Here’s a little update on projects I’ve been working on on the Land.
3 Goals
I’ve got 3 overarching goals for the land:
- Community: build a space that can house a few families living happily with each other and the earth
- Earth: leave the earth here richer and cleaner than I found it
- Resilience: Emphasize local resilience: high food production w/relatively low maintenance, a healthy soil that doesn’t need constant amendments, gear and infrastructure that requires minimal electricity and can be maintained with unpowered hand-tools, and so on.
This is a survey of things I’ve done in February and March. Enjoy!
Scavenging for cheap things and old tools
I’ve been scouring Craigslist, flea markets, and other places for old tools and useful things. I’ve found some real gems!
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| Large glass doors, both straight and curved. Probably for a well-lit bathhouse. |
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| A cast-iron cauldron, estimated 10-12 gallon capacity. Excellent for making broths and dyes and rendering fat. I'm super stoked to have one! |
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| It could use some scrubbing though... |
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| Sawmills make lots of woodchips, shredded mulch, and sawdust they happily give away for free. So many uses! |
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| A local drink-making company very kindly gives away food-grade 55gallon drums. I packed 7 in/on my vehicle, and on this day I felt ok having a small SUV. |
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| The same place that gives away barrels goes through lots of buckets. I snagged a few, and this one has quite a bit of organic ginger juice still in it - super tasty! |
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| These are blacksmithing shears. Super useful for cutting thick metal without power. And they're in great shape too! |
Sugar maple tree – tapping for sap, making syrup
The rough process here is to put taps into sugar maple trees and catch the sap as it pours out, then boil this down and store the resulting syrup. There are some complexities that make this a fun engineering project! I wish I had pictures of the setup I put on each tree. Sugar maples have the highest sugar-to-sap ratio, but it’s still ~33 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup, so it’s a lot of boiling. For anyone gung-ho to do this, I highly recommend the book “Backyard Sugarin’”.
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| Definitely NOT an effective way to boil large amounts of sap down. I'm happy to say I did better than this later, but don't have pics of it. |
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| This is it! The most excellent sap-boiling device I can imagine! It's a commercial stainless-steel sink I got at a scrapyard. I'm going to weld that little sheet (see inside the sink) over the drain so it becomes just a big pot, and next winter I'll be boiling huge amounts of sap way more efficiently than this winter. |
Outdoor sink
I want to live outdoors as much as I can (he says as he types on his screen indoors), so I’ve made an outdoor compu-, ah, I mean, sink. An outdoor sink! This goes with the outdoor fire-heated shower I made last fall.
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| This is already super-cool, and I ain't done yet. It's on a gravel-and-rock foundation and anchored in with locust spikes. It's got a roof with a gutter which I'll use to send rainwater to a rain-barrel so it'll be easy to get water into the shower-barrel for boiling for dishes or showers. And there'll be plumbing and valves allowing the same fire-heated water to be used for showers, sink, or both. |
Soon the sink and shower’ll be attached, so a person can heat up water once to do dishes as well as take a nice long shower. The barrel is big enough for water for several people’s showers (3 without rushing in my experience) + dishes, so my intention is to make it easy to start a hot fire and rage it, and then do dishes and shower at the same time. I’ll install some valves so it’s easy to send the water out either for a shower or dishes. Probably not both at the same time… but I’m sure I’ll experiment.
This is made with roofing metal left by the previous residents here and scavenged wood from a local building supply place or construction dumpsters. The sink was also left out in the woods by the previous residents. I paid for the screws, and I dropped ~$50 on plumbing gear to attach the sink to the barrel (not shown, I haven’t installed the plumbing yet).
A path
I’m big on erosion control, so I made a path! Whenever it rained I could be walking along, minding my own business, and then my foot slips and I scrape a 1-foot gash into the grass and leave a muddy mess behind. With this path, I don’t do that!
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| This is made with locust spikes as black locust is relatively rot resistant, tulip poplar and locust posts since I happened to have them available, and wood chips I got for free from a sawmill nearby. |
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| Side-view of the path. |
I bought a small SUV w/all-wheel drive, a rav4. It’s super useful, but I’ve hated on SUVs for so long, I still sometimes feel upset that I have one. To help me feel better, I made a promise: I’ll never travel to town and back and return with an empty vehicle. So, it’s always full of compost, mulch, barrels, soil – you name it! Mulch and compost I can get for free, so it helps me make the most of the trips. When I’m consistently using all that space, I feel better about having this big ol’ metal monstros- I mean, nice little SUV.
The garden!
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| This garden…. looks the same as it did before I spent many hours working on it. |
Before the previous resident died about 6 years ago, she laid down some plastic sheeting to suppress weeds. Little did she know the sheeting would outlast her! (Or maybe she knew, I don’t know). Anyhoo, an inch of soil had grown over the plastic, and grasses and other plants had put roots through it, and it got brittle. I don’t want toxic plastics in my garden, so I did my level best to pull it all up. I know some is still there, but damned if I didn’t get every little scrap I could find! And the garden is ready for bed-making, not a moment too soon.
Along the same path as the shower and sink, I plan to make one large garden bed, plus plant things in the south-facing stream bank. Since that’s too big a project for me right now, I plan to spread a cover crop where those beds will be to start building the soil now with minimal labor.
Also, I’m happy to
announce the first little sproutlings of my first garden on the land!
These are garlic. I usually plant them in late November, and it was mid-December and I didn’t want to prioritize making beds over a bunch of other projects, so I planted garlic cloves in the pile of soil I made from digging out the shower space, and covered it with leaves. They seem quite happy. They’re also quite in the way, as I’d like to move that pile and put steps where the garlic is. Oh well. The steps will wait!
Fruit tree pruning
I had no idea I love fruit tree pruning so much, but… man I love pruning. And it’s one thing when the tree is properly trained and not too tall – that’s fun. But even more fun is after many years of no-training-at-all, when in order to get to the really gnarly branches I had to climb up high and then walk far out on probably-stout-enough branches to give the tree the needed TLC. Nothing like it! Pruning this way is both thought-provoking and death-defying. An intellectual thriller, if you will.
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| Apple tree, after pruning. Some areas require more pruning, but even I have my death-defying limits, so it'll have to do! |
Some of the trees were so poorly trained I couldn’t even climb them to prune, but this one shown here got a few hours of love. I made it all the way to the top!
Winter firewood
I invented a new unit of measurement – the cubic pallet! Of firewood, in this case. This is a mix of tulip poplar and black locust for next winter. After a couple more of these pallets, I’ll have enough.
Nature observation and trash removal
I love watching the golden ragwort bloom. The flowers start as a cluster of purple buds at the base of the plant…
… then the cluster
shoots into the air!
Next thing I knew, I had multiple mounds of garbage! The previous residents had done what many sadly do, and used the stream bank as a trash pile. Blows my mind. I’m not always in the mood to pick up trash, but when it’s in the stream I can’t help myself. I meant to take a few quick pictures, and 2-3 hours later on a drizzly day I had done a pretty significant stream cleanup!
Filling my li'l SUV-that-could full of this garbage and relieving the land of it all in one trip feels MOST satisfying.
Biochar burn pile
I’m a big fan of making biochar to build soil. As I cut down small trees or create brush, such as through pruning the apple trees, I haul it here and make piles.
After a special burning process, which perhaps I’ll detail later, I get activated charcoal, great for dealing with food poisoning or water purification. After enriching it somehow (ie adding nutrients, such as soaking it in a bucket of urine or food scraps), it becomes enriched activated charcoal, or biochar, and a great soil amendment. I’d love to have a few biochar burns every year as part of feeding the garden.
Ok, quick biochar-making explanation in case I never get around to giving more detail: get a hot fire going, then pull out coals with a hoe and douse them with water to maximize steam, while maintaining the fire. This takes some fun fire-tending skills. Once the last coals are doused, douse it all real good, always maximizing steam. This steam increases the internal surface area of the charcoal, allowing it to soak up more nutrients.
Keylines
I had a few desires here which all had the same answer: keylines!
My desires:
1) build soil in the forest
2) diversify the
forest where it had been clearcut, and then only tulip poplar grew
afterwards. This point includes building diversity of trees and wildlife habitat.
3) keep water on the land as long as possible after each rain (this increases stream flow and makes the land more drought-resistant).
Keylines can be super involved with big earth-moving equipment, or super simple like what I did. Basically I went to an area that was super dense with young tulip poplars and cut some and laid the trunks down along the contour, perpendicular to the slope. This makes a speedbump for the water as it rains and falls downhill. This both retains water on the land and helps build the soil.
It also opens up canopy space to allow other trees to grow. Speaking of other trees...
Planting fruit and nut trees
Last fall I bought apple, chestnut, and shagbark hickory trees to plant! Super exciting. I admit to feeling nervous about the world food system as the US-Russia tensions lead to rising food prices. [The author carefully avoids his soapbox regarding the propaganda about those tensions].
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| Me and a young chestnut. I planted this one on a south facing slope. |
Still, I planted most of the trees in a way that, while it’ll take longer to begin fruiting, I hope will allow them to fruit consistently even as the climate changes more and more.
Quick version: flowering trees decide to flower when the ground reaches a certain temperature. Trees on south-facing slopes get more sun, so they flower earlier. A late frost that occurs after they flower could kill all the flowers and prevent any fruit from forming that fall even if the tree is otherwise healthy.
Planting on the north-facing slope (I’ve heard east-facing is also fine) mitigates this risk: the trees flower later in the spring because the soil stays cold longer, reducing the risk of the tree flowers succumbing to a late frost.
The downside is that the trees grow slower since they get less sun, meaning it'll be more years 'til they start bearing fruit. So I’m making a long-term investment in the land here by planting on the north slope. Hopefully it works out! As the climate gets weirder, I expect more and more late frosts, and so this is a major strategy for mitigating that issue.
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| I'm pointing to a baby shagbark hickory. May this tree tower over 100' tall someday and feed hundreds of animals! |
Also, I planted the
li’l shagbark hickories on the keylines, which will give them water
as the water falls down the hill, stops at the keyline-speedbump,
and then gets soaked up by the hickory. One resource said shagbark
hickories start bearing a lot of nuts after 50-60 years. A long term
investment, indeed. Hopefully people or non-humans enjoy them someday.
The End For Now
Well, that’s what I got to show for the last couple months here. I love this land! I look forward to sharing it with other people as I find friends or make friends who’d like to join me out here.
