Trench Filling, Chainsaw Work, Sun For Solar Power, Rodents In The Storage & Musings About Land Stewardship
I somehow managed to fall back asleep for two more hours this morning after initially waking up at one thirty-four which was made a bit easier due to the pitter-patter sounds of it raining combined with the dogs snuggling up to me under the blankets. When I awoke again later it was raining much harder and as I write this now it is absolutely pouring rain and I even heard a little thunder in the distance but thankfully not quite enough of it to be all that nerve wracking for the dogs or anything. Oddly enough considering how the rain often makes it feel warmer I was feeling a bit chilly so I turned the propane heater on and now the tent is feeling quite warm inside and it also feels quite humid because of the rain and the high moisture content of the propane heat itself but honestly the warm humidity makes my joints ache less so it is pretty relaxing to say the least. I was at first a wee bit tempted to just crawl back under the blankets and get back to dreaming the weird dream that I was having but I think that the nearly ten hours of sleep that I just got was more than sufficient.
Anyway, first thing in the morning (now yesterday) I headed out early with my two small girl dogs to that area where I have been filling in those large trenches and set to work on filling the remaining thirty-odd meters of trench with soil. The work itself went rather easily except for there being a bunch of kudzu vines in the way but this time I was prepared for them and had brought a small pull-saw (pruning saw) with me to make quick work of cutting the tough vines. That final stretch of trench was a real mess because there was also other kinds of vines as well as a bunch of small privet bushes in the way but I did not let the obstacles slow me down and just kept at it until it was all done.
By the time that I got to that final section of trench I had my technique for filling in the trench down rather well and I would first pull all the pine needles (and tree branches) out of the trench itself, then I would scrape back all the pine needles and other debris from the berm of dirt beside the trench and cut back any vegetation along the way during that part of things. Once I got all the soil berm revealed I would then go along its edge closest to the trench and with the shovel head at a forty-five degree angle I would slice off the edge of the berm and let it fall into to the trench before walking back along the berm taking one shovel load at a time from the center of the berm and tossing it into the trench. By doing things this way it was easy to break up the hard packed soil of the berm and then I could just slide the shovel along and scoop the rest of the soil into the trench until it was filled. Of course between each phase of the trench filling I would walk along the filled in portion and tamp the soil down into the trench the best that I could with my boots just to compact the soil a bit.
After I was finished with the trench filling work I hiked to the new shelter site, put the two small girl dogs into the dog yard there and went back to the base camp to retrieve the other dogs, the wagon, some tools, another plywood countertop (for use at the new site) and a plastic table so that I would have somewhere to set my tools, food and beverages while I am working at the site. It was a bit of a heavy load in the wagon but between me and my boy dog hauling it we got it pulled over to the shelter site without too much difficulty. After I got the other dogs put in the dog yard I unloaded the table, got it setup on a flat spot and unloaded all the tools onto it which was nice because I no longer had to bend over every time that I wanted to pick up a tool to use.
The first thing that I did at the shelter site was to take down all the mason string that I had setup for the layout of the dog yard fence a few days before and get it all wound back up and put out of the way so that I could begin felling trees without them falling on the string and potentially damaging it. I was also tired of ducking under the strings every time that I was walking around the site! The way that I have things setup it will be easy enough to pull the strings again to act as guides for the fencing that I am going to install in the area so taking it all down was really not that big of a deal aside from having to tediously wind it all up.
With all the strings out of the way I walked around the site a bit, looked at what all trees that I would need to fell and figured out which order I should drop them in to ensure that they would not only be easy to buck (de-limb) but also how to avoid them getting hung up in other trees as I was felling them. It is kind of funny but the very first tree that I fell got hung up anyway because it had a massive amount of vines connecting the top of it to another tree and I wound up having to cut the trunk in multiple spots to get it to pull itself free enough from the vines so that I could drag it away by the base and get it laying on the ground.
I have no idea how many trees I cut down but whoa did it make a mess of the area and nearly the entire shelter site was littered with felled trees, vines and dead branches. I once again saved as many of the long straight sections of trees as I could and added the super long ones to a stack that I made off to the side of the site a few days ago, the shorter poles I added to that stack at the top of the site and as far as the remaining brush (limbs) goes I just piled them wherever I could on those existing brush piles that I have been adding to over the last week. I also took the time to section down the larger branches into firewood and began a firewood stack so that it could all start drying out and getting cured.
For the most part my day consisted of lots of chainsaw work and hauling brush. The saw itself started giving me problems about halfway through the day and eventually it would not start at all and when it did start it would not remain running for more than just a few seconds. After pulling the spark plug and cleaning it (to no avail) and checking the air filter (which was free of obstructions) I deduced that either the saw's idle needs to be adjusted or the carburetor had finally gotten so gunked up that it was not operating properly. Thankfully I had some carburetor cleaner in the storage tent and after spraying it in the carburetor a few times and trying to start the saw it eventually started running again and I was able to keep cutting stuff up, hauling it out of the way and getting the stumps from the trees cut down to ground level and 'waffle' cutting the tops of the stumps to help promote them rotting faster. If it all sounds like a heck of a lot of work it sure was but I really think that pulling on the chainsaw cord (trying to start it) wore me out more than anything else!
Originally I was going to leave more trees in the area than what I wound up leaving but after learning about how bad the termites are here and doing some reading about how they dislike sunny areas I thought that it was best to just open the area up to the sunlight as much as possible without removing the big trees growing in the area. Like I have said before the forest is way too thick with trees (as a result of the clear cut logging done to it thirty or forty years ago) and will benefit immensely from thinning the trees out and reducing the amount of strangler vines so please understand that I am merely doing some forestry management and not blindly hacking down living trees. My other consideration with all of that was that the last place that I lived was in more or less perpetual shade and I had a hell of a time trying to grow stuff and keep the mold at bay so I thought it best to just make this site a sunny one and avoid those things from occurring altogether.
Once I got the majority of the trees felled I also noticed that where I will be building the shelter itself that there was really good direct sunlight and although I did not time it I think that it got around three hours of direct sun which is almost what I need for my solar panels and I think that if I fell just one or two more trees at the southern edge of the site that I could get another hour or so of full sun which would be plenty to meet my solar needs. There are other spots on the property that get much better sunlight throughout the day but none of them are really close to the shelter site so I would have to run a lot of wire to get the electricity from the panels to the shelter site itself where I am thinking to build a small building just to house all the batteries, charge controllers and inverters for the solar power system. The folks here even have a bunch of solar panels (and some old batteries) that I can use so I am pretty excited to eventually get all of that setup and hopefully create more than enough electricity to mine some crypto with. Yeah I am still stuck on the idea of doing that and doubt that I will ever deviate from my plans to make it happen one way or another!
All that jazz aside, life is not all that bad at the moment even though I am living in a tent and my stuff stored in that storage tent now has signs of rodents getting into it and destroying stuff. As far as that last bit goes I guess that all those mouse and rat (spring) traps that I bought several months ago are about to become incredibly handy! I knew when I stored everything in there that I would more than likely encounter a rodent problem but I did not think that it would happen quite so quickly but really I should have known that as soon as it started raining (and getting colder) that the rodents would begin looking for dry places to nest in. What I am also considering doing is rearranging the living quarters tent and moving the totes that I have journals/books in and all my fabric stuff into the tent with me and the dogs just to ensure that the rodents do not destroy it. The tent that I am living in really could be setup inside better than it is because I basically just plopped everything into place and did not really account for 'ease of use' nor maximizing the available space inside. Upon my arrival here I was like 'whoa this is plenty of room' but now after nearly a week and a half of being here I am like: Hmmmm this could all be made much better! Perhaps if it continues to rain this morning after the sun comes up I will start shuffling stuff around in the living tent and see what sort of configurations that I can come up with but one way or another I really need to protect my stuff from the rodents.
Something worth mentioning is that the folks here are going to get me another one of those big storage tents so that I can set it up at the new shelter site which will not only eliminate the need for me to lug my tools back and forth each day with the wagon but it will also act as good dry storage for building materials. I am also excited about the tent because I can put my music rig in it (out of the weather) and also use the space as a shop which is something that I have been sorely missing in my life and often limits the number of projects that I am willing to work on due to inadequate room to work on them. As much as I love tinkering on stuff it is always such a pain in the ass to do that sort of thing in my living space or outdoors. Just having a place where I can work on things over many days at a time will be nice also because I all too often have to put projects away because I need the space for something else. I have said it for years now but I so look forward to the day when I can successfully divorce my living, studio, shop and storage spaces from all being the same damned space!
Well, the rain does not appear to be stopping so perhaps I will churn out a few more words before wrapping this up. Either way the morning will be a 'bust' for working outdoors until things dry up a bit and since I was only planning on burning brush today I have some free time and the wetter things get the safer the brush burning project will be. As a side note I think that I might skip making a bunch of bio-char with this first burn and focus instead on making some ashes for my recently started dog poop compost at the new shelter site. I am unsure if the compost mound will remain where it is now located but after I see how all this rainwater sheds off the shelter site I will have a better understanding of how the surface water flows there and whether the compost mound is in a good place or not. The one thing that has been lacking in my shelter site planning has been knowing how the surface water flows in that area so hopefully after this morning I will have that key piece of information and can adjust my plans accordingly.
On a different note, uprooting my life and starting over at a new location is never easy (nor simple) and I often enter it knowing that things will be difficult at first, still difficult later and eventually (about six months to a year in) I will achieve at least a modicum of comfort and perhaps a sprinkling of convenience mostly via my own hard work and ingenuity with 'working with junk' but in this instance the dynamic of things is very different. The biggest factor that has kept me from getting burned out in the first week here is that I had a base camp setup for me before my arrival and like I said before that alone reduced a massive amount of work for me because I basically had only a minimal initial setup to do and could promptly focus on picking a shelter site, begin prepping the new site and working on land related projects for the owners on the very first day. Usually my initial first week at a place goes very differently and I am thankful for the owners going to such lengths not just to get me moved here in the first place but also setting me up so well, maintaining clear communication, heeding my advice on things and playing a massively supportive role in me accomplishing both my own and their goals which is all how the hell things should be when folks bring a caretaker onto their land to do improvements.
Honestly over the years I have put myself in some real shit situations and just 'made the best of it' along the way which generally comes at some sort of cost to myself either mentally, physically, financially or some combination of the three which is sort of a recipe for frigging disaster if you ask me. Some places that I go into, I know that they will be short-term but there has assuredly been several that I thought otherwise of and heavily invested myself thinking only about the long-term and the prospect of never having to move again. Dealing with folks on their land is always a can of worms and few folks really 'rise to the occasion' of being a good steward to not just their land but also to their land steward! I know that it is difficult for folks to really wrap their head around but when I am at a site the site itself continually gets my attention regardless of if there is pay involved or not and it is not so much the work itself (land improvements) that are valuable but the few decades of knowledge behind that work combined with my ability to hold the 'long view' of what a place can become and continually working towards fulfilling all the steps in between that are truly valuable contributions.
As much as my personal life is at the center of my existence... it in and of itself is always 'on the job' and the places that I live I do my best to treat as a 'work place' which sounds a lot easier than it really is but I compartmentalize stuff in my mind well enough that given all my years of practice doing it I can parse out the difference between those two things and keep a clear head and consistent perspective through nearly any social dynamic involving other folks. Of course there will always be stuff that I will not tolerate (nor tolerate for very long) which often prompts me to re-locate but hell I at least 'move on' in life with my self respect and integrity intact so I have no real complaints there aside from wishing that I had had he foresight not to get myself into one situation or another (where I would have to tolerate stuff) in the first place.
All of that makes me think of something that my friend that helped me move said the first day that we were packing stuff into the moving truck which was basically: "Jacob, you do not want to pay rent and you cannot get along with people... so what are you going to do?" I still do not have a good reply to that and my friend is spot on correct in their summarization of the predicament of having to move that I find myself in every few years or sometimes even less. I have actually explained the 'paying rent as a land steward' thing in numerous writings and videos and I will not try to recap all that here but suffice it to say that doing what I do for a property and paying rent is a short road to harboring entirely too much resentment and something that I found that landowners often tend to exploit either intentionally or unintentionally and it is best left out of the equation all together because who the hell pays to be at their workplace twenty-four hours a day seven days a week and does a solid quarter (or more) of their land improvement/maintenance work for 'free' to boot. All I can say is that I am super fucking glad that at this location none of that 'paying rent' horseshit will ever enter the equation because the landowners here are actually former caretakers and know the dynamics of that quagmire all too well!
Heck, it is still pitter-pattering rain outside but I am going to wrap this up even though I am feeling inspired to write me because it is much later in the morning than when I usually get all the writing finished and one way or another I need to get on with my day. I have also yet to have my espresso because I do not want to make it on the outdoor stove in the rain! Maybe once I get that second storage tent I can setup the stove in the current storage tent and finally have a way to make my favorite beverage out of the weather! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice (or nice enough) day/night.
The quality control officer surveying the final stretch of the trench filling project!
This is the new spot that I am thinking to place the shelter in.
The firewood stack that I started!
The pile of long poles that I made to the side of the shelter site.
The big pile of brush that I am planning on turning into ashes!
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That Is All For Now!
This post was originally posted to the Hive Blockchain here:
https://peakd.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/apocalyptic-homesteading-day-10
