The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Winter mud season

Hauling water on the golf cart in winter budThere's always so much work to do on the farm that we never seem to have time to be proactive, only reactive.  Water is a prime example.  Since the summer, we've had "bury water lines" on our to do list, but it never quite made it up onto the tasks we meant to conquer in any given week.  So when the first really cold spell hit, our lines froze and we were out of water.

Over the next week, Mark and I plan to get the water lines buried and the problem solved.  But in the short term, the dishes were piling up a foot above the sink.  So Sunday afternoon Mark and I set out in pursuit of immediate water.  We loaded some buckets into the club car and drove down to the creek through winter mud --- the kind that sits over half frozen ground and lets none of the recent rain drain away from the surface.

Half full bucketsOur journey occurred before Mark installed the ice chains, so it was no surprise that we got stuck a few times and had to work our way free.  Mark lifted up the offending portion of the golf cart with the spud bar while I hit the acceleration and also pushed the cart along with one foot --- kinda like in the Flintstones but with my foot sticking out the side of the cart instead of through a hole in the floor.  Soon enough we'd filled up buckets at the creek and strapped them in place for the slipping, sliding journey home.

When we pulled up at the trailer door, both of us splattered with mud and water, our buckets had lost half of the water they'd started out with.  But both of us were laughing and invigorated from the adventure --- our buckets were indeed half full!



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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