You can barely make out where the left rut here has several cinder blocks laid next to each other in an attempt to harden up an area that sometimes has running water passing through.

It's been over 4 years now and the cinder block mini ford has proven itself to be a long term workable replacement to big gravel, which has a tendency to spread out and sink even deeper under these conditions.

The only problem was a 20 degree tilt over time as heavy trucks and golf carts weighed heavily on its outer edge. I think the angle might even help some of the tires grip easier in wet conditions, but it's never been a problem.

I wrote about the resumption of rainy weather yesterday afternoon, after Mark drove Joey's truck out to leave it across the creek and out of harm's way.  It seems like we made the right call.  Rain pounded on the roof all night, bringing our week's total up over 7 inches.  By the time I walked Lucy, the creek had risen from my ankle to my knee.

I dawdled a bit more than I should have since I knew from the doppler radar that I only had about twenty minutes between cloudbursts.  But how could I resist trying to capture fog between the hills or a box turtle catching a huge leech right along the edge of the public road?  My dawdling was worthwhile --- two trucks of tree trimmers/chippers rolled by and I flagged them down to ask if they would dump some wood chips in our parking area.  They agreed (although they've agreed before, and no wood chips have shown up), so I scurried around to move our vehicles out of the way and give them a place to dump my biomass.

Now an hour had passed and the rain was pouring down.  The muddy creek had risen past the middle of my thigh, and at the rate the rain is still falling, I suspect we may attain flood conditions today.  I love the neverending excitement on our farm!

Wednesday morning, the doppler radar looked like this.  We'd had 5 inches of rain already in the past week, the alligator swamp was filling back up, and the main creek was once more creating a waterfall off the edge of the ford.  Clearly, our three week dry season had come to an abrupt end.

At times like this, I feel like I'm always a step or two behind the weather, scurrying to catch up.  I'd just gotten into the swing of drying fruit without a dehydrator and would have liked to continue my success with tomatoes.  I also had another week's worth of hauling on Mark's agenda.  But the weather has mandated that we shift gears, so we will --- on to weeding and mowing, planting the last of the fall crops, and maybe finally finishing the shed.

To be fair, drippy summer afternoons when I'm just barely chilled in a t-shirt and shorts are probably on my top ten list of favorite times.  The rain encloses me in a cocoon of gray noise and my mind becomes so clear I can feel deep thoughts gelling in the corners.

Half of you are going to find this post ludicrously basic, but I suspect the other half of you never learned the facts of life from your mother.  Paper towels seem to be the last bastion of consumer society found in many homesteaders' households, but the truth is that you already have a free alternative --- rags.

How to make rags
The first step in making rags is wearing your clothes into the ground.  After a certain point, there's no purpose in mending a piece of clothing --- the fabric has degraded so much that it will merely rip along your mended seam.  Or maybe your t-shirt now has half a dozen holes that seem to get bigger every day.  Put it in the rag bag.

Once a year or so, I get around to pulling out the rag bag and taking a look.  First, I sort my old clothes into three piles --- 100% cotton, partially synthetic, and fully synthetic or bulky.  The last category doesn't have much use on our homestead, so we tend to relegate it to winter pet bedding, but all of the others will be used.  We turn 100% cotton clothes into fodder for my bees' smoker, and everything else becomes rags.  Underwear and t-shirts make the best smoker fodder and rags, and luckily they're the pieces of clothing that wear out the quickest.

Making rags is simple.  Just cut through any turned-under edges, then riiiiiiiip.  (Rag production is also a great way to improve your mood if you're down in the dumps --- so satisfying.)  It's best to tear off and discard underwear waistbands and t-shirt collars, but otherwise there are no rules.  Just be sure to end up with rags roughly eight inches by eight inches.

How to use rags
Now, how do you use rags?  The first line of defense in our household is the wash cloth.  These storebought items (costing perhaps a quarter apiece at the dollar store) will last years as long as you use them for gentle cleaning like doing dishes and wiping down counters.  I only pull out rags when I'm going to be working in more goopy or disgusting situations, like wiping oil off a machine or cleaning up fecal matter.

What do you do with a dirty rag?  If it's not too filthy, rinse it out in the sink, then drape it over the side of the laundry basket to dry.  Rags can then be washed with your regular laundry.  On the other hand, we reserve the right to throw rags away if they're too awful --- that's why we use them for the more disgusting tasks that would retire a wash cloth.

We tend to go through rags at just about exactly the same rate we go through clothes.  You're probably discarding your clothing too soon and buying too much of it if you're overrun with rags.

For those of you who were raised using rags, I'm curious to hear what you'd add to my rag tutorial.  Any helpful tips for the uninitiated?  Any uses for those bulky blue jeans and fleece shirts?

Perhaps in other parts of the world, it's not considered abnormally dry when you've had a steady one inch of rain per week for most of the summer?  Around here it sure feels dry, though, after a month with abnormal highs in the nineties nearly every day.  The floodplain has dried up, meaning that even though there are puddles of water in the driveway, the ground between is hard rather than mud.  Perfect weather for hauling.

Last winter, when we were trying to ferry in building supplies through endless muck, Titus gently noted that she tries to do all of her hauling during the dry season.  So when we realized the driveway was firm enough to allow Joey's truck to pass through, we dropped everything from the list and instead focused on ferrying supplies into the farm.  That's why Mark went to town nearly every day last week, hauling in compost and mulch.  It wasn't photogenic enough to post about, but he also hauled out a year's supply of household garbage --- a truckload and a half full.

We hope to finish bringing in the year's supply of biomass this week, and also cut up and haul in firewood from deadfall trees along the driveway.  Round it all out with some lumber for the solar dehydrator and picnic table projects, and we should be done hauling for a long, long time.  I just thought you all deserved an explanation so that you didn't think we were on a crazy spending spree.

Big thanks go out to Travis and Kacy for the nice post they wrote about us.

They're still on the cross country journey and have visited about 90 farming types.

I'm looking forward to reading their book about these travels which now has a working title of "Stewards: Stories and Perspectives From American Farmers".

I've been putting a lot of thought lately into how we invest the fruits of our labors.  A decade ago, I read a basic investment book that told me to put 10% of my income in a mutual fund for retirement, and I've been following along like a sheep ever since.

But investing in a combination of stocks and bonds means that I believe in a growth economy.  Do I?  I certainly don't believe a growth economy is good, and I'm not so sure that I believe our economy will grow over the next forty years.

On the other hand, I don't really believe in apocalyptic scenarios either, so I don't plan to invest in gold.  (As Mark pointed out, coins worth over a thousand dollars apiece are unlikely to be terribly useful in an apocalyptic scenario anyway.)  I'm guessing social security will be around when I retire, but may only pay out half of what my statements tell me to expect.  Perhaps our best bet is to put our dribs and drabs of retirement money in some combination of ultra-safe investments (like CDs) and into farm infrastructure to make our annual operating costs lower.

I'm curious to hear our readers' take on investment in today's climate.  Do you stick to the rosy view that the economy will rebound, meaning that social security will fulfill most of your needs and you'll round out your retirement income with some sort of mutual fund?  Or do you think society as we know it will collapse and social security will be completely absent, so you'd better stock up on firearms?  I'm most curious to hear from folks who think the future will be somewhere in the middle --- how do you invest for your old age?

Once the parts Festiva blazed a trail through the now mostly dry flood plain I decided it was ready for the big truck.

It made it with no problems once I added a few buckets of gravel in a few key spots saving us hours of labor compared to hauling with the golf cart.

I decided our driveway was in a good enough state of dryness to see if the parts Festiva had what it takes to help tow out the golf cart for some expert repair.


It only got stuck once, which was quickly fixed by modifing the ruts to fit the bigger wheel base.

I'm pretty sure this is a once a year opportunity and when the rain kicks back to a more regular schedule the flood plain will earn its name back. In the meantime it's nice to have a back up to our much valued golf cart.

This is the petroglyph we based our Walden Effect T-shirt on.

Petroglyphs are rock carvings found all around the world dating back as far as 12 thousand years.

This one seemed to be trying to transmit some sort of message which I'm still trying to decipher.

As you can see in this photo of my mom, we've had our Walden Effect t-shirts for two solid weeks.  I've been holding out on you because I can't seem to figure out whether we'll be able to send the t-shirts for a couple of dollars as first class mail or if we have to pay $5 for priority mail.  I finally decided to just let the first few customers buy them at the cheap price ($10), and if it costs more to mail the shirts, we'll raise the price later.  So buy them while they're hot!

Here are some quick stats so you'll see whether our t-shirt is right up your alley:

• Color is "serene green" --- as pictured.  I chose the color because it's light enough to work in outside in the sun, but earthy enough that those pesky weeding stains will be less visible.
  
• T-shirt is "2000 Gildan Ultra Cotton", which is 100% cotton, unisex, 6.1 oz.
• Printing is on the front in black and gray.  The image is based on a petroglyph, tweaked to suit our permaculture farm.  You can see a more head-on image of the design here.
  
• Sizes are M, L, XL, and XXL.  Be sure to note your size with your order!  I decided to merge the slight additional cost for the XXL into the overall price, so all of the t-shirts cost $10 apiece (with free shipping in the U.S.)  But I ordered fewer XXL and XL than perhaps I should have --- if that's your size, you might want to buy now.  (If you're medium or large, you can probably wait a while.)

I hope you'll enjoy our t-shirts and then email me an image of your Walden Effect style in your own garden.  I'd love to post a collage of all of our loyal readers on their home turf.  (If you hate the design, though, don't feel in any way obligated to buy one.)

We took the morning off to be interviewed by fellow bloggers Travis and Kacy from the Portrait of a Farm blog.

They're on a cross country adventure that will evenutally end up in Ashland, Oregon.

I liked the questions they focused on and was refreshed by their enthusiasm for this project, which is to interview farmers and homesteaders along their way back to the upper west coast with a twist towards  permaculture techniques.

Human names elude me.  Without really trying, I can rattle off the scientific names of hundreds of plants, tell you their lineage, their uses, where they like to grow.  But present me with a few people, and they blur together into a sea of faces.

I can just hear what you want to say --- "I have a hard time with names too."  Let me clarify with a short story.  When I was a freshman in college, a girl sat at my table every day, but for weeks (months? maybe even the whole first semester?) I didn't know who she was and I mostly ignored her.  Then, one day, she brought a potted heather plant to lunch with her.  "Nice plant," I said.  "Yes, it's a heather, just like my name," she replied.  A light went off in my head --- this girl's name was Heather, which was a plant, so I could remember her!  Now, to use modern parlance, we are BFFs.

I've been thoroughly enjoying everyone's insightful comments, especially over the last few weeks, but it bothers me that I have a hard time remembering which one of you is the pig farmer and which one lives on the prairie.  I considered asking you all to rename yourselves after plants, but then I came up with an even better solution!  Anyone who wants can now create an account on Walden Effect.  This will make it easier for you since your comments will post immediately (rather than waiting for me to check in and mark them as non-spam.)  You'll also be able to create your own user page, with links to your main webpages, maybe a photo of yourself, and hopefully at least one reference to a plant or animal to jog my memory.

I hope you'll give it a try!  Just click here and follow the directions to make your account and user page.  If you run into any problems, just email me and I'll make them better.  You might also want to read about all of the registered users on Walden Effect.

Don't want to share?  That's okay --- you can still post comments anonymously or by typing in your name just the way you always could.  Either way, I look forward to learning more about you!

 

We finally got around to trimming a few of the downed pine trees this afternoon left over from the blizzard of 2009.

If you read our rundown on 2009's top ten goals, you may be asking --- what are our major projects for 2010?

1. Revisit the creek crossing.  Maybe build solid, higher stepping stones.  Or a zip line.  Or a better bridge.  Still pondering this one.  The goal is to get us across the creek during moderate to high water.
   
2. Finish our homemade storage building.  Number two on our list, but number one on our agenda.
   
3. Experiment with ways to get humanure to our fruit trees.  We're considering building a movable "outhouse" that will let us fill pits with human waste interspersed with leaves and bones.  My goal is to safely dispose of all of the wastes, but in such a way that they'll rot down into fertilizer that the trees can grow their roots into.  We hope to develop a method which will ensure that we don't have to handle the waste.  Again, still pondering --- more on this once I read the Humanure book that I skimmed last year.
   
4. Running water in the trailer.  Finishing up last year's waterline burying expedition.
   
5. Figure out chicken reproduction.  Yeah, yeah, I know all about the birds and the bees.  But our broody hen is a terrible mother, so we'd like to give our electric incubator another try.  But our house has too much temperature variation for the incubator to work as is (we've tried), so Mark's going to build an insulated brood box to keep the incubator at more of a steady temperature.  Hopefully we can raise enough chickens this year to eat some.  Whether we'll break down and take on a free-loader rooster is still up in the air.
   
6. Figure out a way to keep a constant mulch cover over the entire garden.  This may mean buying a chipper or hunting down those utility line trucks to get a mass of wood chips for longer term mulching (once they rot down.)  Or raking more leaves.  Or getting more serious about grass clippings (maybe with a riding mower so we can cover more territory?)  Probably some combination of the above.  No matter how we do it, I want to spend less time weeding so that we can expand the garden in 2011 to grow some of our own grain.  Right now, we can't expand anything or I'll go nuts during weeding season!
   
7. Figure out mushroom reproduction.  As you've read in our mushroom lunchtime series, we're well on our way.
8. Find a temporary caretaker to check on the farm when we're away.  This isn't essential right now but is a prerequisite for any potential dairy animals.
   
9. Start fencing or hedging pasture areas for potential sheep/goats/pigs.  Big livestock are on our ten year plan, so we'd better get ready for them!
   
10. Bathing room.  Once the storage building is in place, there'll be room in the trailer to make a really nice bathtub with a view of the garden.  Maybe I could even have a supplemental bathing area outdoors for the summer months too?
    
11. Solidify the driveway with more rocks.  This mostly just means money to hire someone to haul rip-rap for us.  And tracking him down to do the hauling.  Then some rock spreading.
    
12. Fix the fridge root cellar.
    

Once again, my ability to count to 10 is in serious doubt.  But listing twelve top goals gives me some wiggle room so that if we complete ten we'll still have succeeded.  It's clearly going to be another exciting year on the farm!

Just keeping the farm going uses most of our energy, but we like to end each year a little better off than the last.  I get easily frustrated, though, when the big projects have to get pushed to the back burner to accomodate planting, weeding, and the usual cycle of farm chores.  The solution?  Take the dozens of big projects we'd like to complete and narrow them down to the top ten to be completed each year.

I thought you might enjoy seeing last year's top ten goals (and our status on each project).  This is my version of New Year's resolutions --- why make a resolution when you can instead make a plan?

1. Better steps to the house.  We shored up the existing steps and they work fine.
2. Fence deer out of the full perimeter.  After some fencing, Mark invented our deer deterrent, which solved the same problem for vastly smaller amounts of time and money.
3. Start saving for retirement (again.)  This goal fell by the wayside for a few years as we poured our finances into the farm's startup costs.  Luckily, this year we got back on track and started putting money away again.  (Check out our ebook for information about becoming fiscally solvent on the farm.)
4. Running water in the trailer.  We came close to reaching this goal, burying about 75% of the water line from the thousand gallon tank to the trailer.  We've still got a bit more to go, though, which is why our lines froze up and we went back to carrying water.
5. Bees.  We started our bees!
6. Irrigation to all plants.  Due to an extremely wet summer, we didn't water much at all.  But we did put in most of the irrigation infrastructure we'll need.  We'll test it out during the next drought.
7. Expand the shiitakes.  We not only added a few more shiitake logs, we even started oyster mushrooms (which fruited already!)
8. Root cellar.  After embarking on a huge root cellar project, we changed directions and decided to work on making a root cellar out of a fridge.  We completed it, but the dirt slumped in a rain and pushed the fridge over.  We need to dig it out and add a roof.
9. Fix the barn roof.  We didn't get to this....
10. Build a wider, higher footbridge.  We shored up the existing bridge instead, but it gave out in early winter.
11. Build a woodshed.  Done!
12. Build Mark a loft/office space.  We built him a loft inside the trailer, then made a good start on our new building.

As you can see, we didn't manage to narrow our goals down to ten, but we did complete seven and make good progress on another four.  Not too bad for working around all of the little things that inevitably come up on a farm!  Stay tuned for this year's overly ambitious goals in a later post.

The snow is almost gone, which means mud, mud, and more mud.

My mom gave us some baby crib pieces back in the summer left over from an emergency turkey transport she was constructing which have really worked out well as a catch for my wood splitting station.

It was a real bummer to watch a nice dry piece of firewood split its way directly in the mud.

The old house at the edge of the yard has been on its way out ever since I bought the property.  It was built with no foundation and no structural elements except for thin walls, and yet it stood for three quarters of a century.  By the time I arrived on the property, it had developed a bit of a lean and the porch and one room had collapsed, but we probably could have shored it up.  Mark wasn't in the picture yet, though, and I knew nothing, so I commenced to tear it down.  Here's an animation showing me tearing down the second of the four rooms:

By the time Mark stepped in and stopped me, I had torn the house down to the original two rooms, then had ripped half the walls off what remained.  What little structure the house once had was long gone, but the house stood for another year or two anyway.  Finally, it developed such a major lean that we were afraid it would fall on Lucy in the night, so we yanked it down with the hand winch, but never managed to take the time to disassemble it.

This week, I've finally put house demolition back on the to do list.  Mark's got the homemade storage building walls nearly complete, and then he'll be needing a roof.  I figure we can save about $200 by reusing the old tin, and that doesn't even take into consideration the thick rafters that are already cut to just the right length.  Finally, the old house is worth taking apart.

I have to admit my ulterior motive, though.  The old house sits on some of the richest soil in our yard, ground that I've been eying for years.  By taking the house apart, I'll have yet more garden space!

 

I think this is the design I've settled on for increasing the load capacity of the golf cart. You can order the shiny new metal version for about 350 dollars, or maybe a sheet of plywood with a few 2x6's could become a nice low budget home made dump box for your golf cart. Soon this project will move from my imagination to the Wetknee drawing board once the storage building project gets wrapped up.

We are thrilled with how the new labels turned out for the automatic chicken waterer.
Anna did a great job on the drawing.
It's good to know someone who knows someone in the label business. Thanks, Jayne.

The regular reader may have noticed several changes to our site over the last few weeks.  First, my sweet brother helped me turn our archives into a much more usable format.  You can now browse through past entries by year and month.  So, if you get busy and miss a week of our blog, it's easy to check back in and catch up in one gulp.  Alternatively, why not read back over last year's posts to see how much our farm has changed in the last twelve months?

Meanwhile, I put some extra ads at the top of the page.  I appreciate no one whining and complaining --- I hope the ads don't impinge too much on your experience.  Including some advertising on the blog helps fund our adventure so that we can put in lots of time experimenting and relaying our experiences to you rather than getting a real job.   If you haven't lately, please go window shopping on some of our advertising sponsors' sites.  (Alternatively, if you're morally opposed to advertising, feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed and read our posts in your own, ad-free reader.)

Last stop on Walden Effect --- I've revamped our tag system.  Now you can read all of our posts about permaculture in one place.  Ditto for posts about our golf cart.

Finally, I've started blogging part-time over on our microbusiness ebook site.  If you're interested in learning tidbits about starting a home-based business to fund your own homestead adventure, I hope you'll subscribe to our home-based business blog.  I'll probably be posting over there two or three times a week.

Okay, now I'll return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of leaves, leaves, leaves!

It's been almost a week now since we upgraded the rear tires on the golf cart and the only regret I have is that we didn't do this as soon as we liberated her from the nice and clean campground that she came from. I would guess that our ground grippage has doubled in comparison to the traction cables we had rigged on her before.

We decided to upgrade the traction chains on the golf cart to a more respectable solution. Now we can cruise through the mud with a bit more ease.

We got back home Thursday after dark, so I was shocked the next morning when I stumbled out of bed, looked out the window, and saw huge blobs of color on the hillside.  Autumn leaves!

Sunday, the cloudy weather broke for a few hours, and I took Lucy and the camera out in the woods to explore.  Mushrooms had popped up all over and freshly fallen leaves were strewn around them.  Closer to home, our shiitake logs were all coated in mushrooms, despite not being soaked in weeks.  I guess this is perfect mushroom weather --- cool and wet.

And now, Monday morning, the ground is thick with our first frost and temperatures are in the mid 20s.  Surely we haven't skipped straight to winter?

Mark wants to live in a round house some day, and I have to admit that the idea has merit every time I go visit Joey's yurt.  The circles and lines in the yurt always capture my interest and I end up taking photos that could almost be abstract, like the one on the left.

Joey considered taking the yurt down for the winter, but instead he bought a Two Dog Stove, specially designed for safe use in tents.  The stove is so small that Joey was able to carry it in by himself soon after our most recent flood.  Setup took mere minutes with the ultra-cool telescoping stove pipe --- no need to laboriously fit pieces together; just grab both ends and puuuullll....  I'm curious to see how well the stove keeps Joey warm during his wintry visits to the farm.

Honeymoon, day 1.  We drove south out of the mountains of Virginia all the way down to the flatlands of Alabama.  Roadside pine trees push their way in amid the hardwoods I'm used to and an unfamiliar grass coats the edge of the blacktop.  We don't stop for me to botanize, although we do pass a man pulled off on the side of a six lane highway by a lake, fishing pole in hand.

Down south, the humidity has not yet lifted to give way to a crisp, mountain fall.  I'm a homebody most of the time, but I love the feeling of covering new territory, even if it is pavement and buildings.  Mark and I sleep fitfully and wake up early, in a different time zone, ready to explore a Native American mound!

(Nothing photogenic yet on our trip, so this is a picture of the lemon tree soon after we brought it inside to prepare for our trip.  Huckleberry enjoyed the new addition to his living space.)

The wringer washer is working again with a small leak, which is a bit smaller than before.

I think silicone was a bad choice for this problem due to the nature of the metal in question, but I went for it because it's what I had on hand.

Next time I think I'll take john wilson's advice and use some of that fiberglass bondo stuff when trying to merge this type of metal with a hard plastic.

 

I found out today that our Maytag wringer washer is the model E2L, the longest running production of any of the wringer machines. The run started in 1945 and the last one was made in 1983.

Judging by how brittle our discharge hose was I'm guessing ours is closer to the 1945 era. I tried building one back from scrap pieces and 2 layers of silicone. Tomorrow will be the test run to see if this operation is a viable solution without any leaking.

Wednesday night reached a low of 37 F --- dangerously close to the frost.  We're not ready to light our first fire, so it took a while for us to emerge from our nightly cocoons.  When I did get up, Strider was unusually affectionate, nestling down beside me as I read my morning blogs, and even Lucy didn't seem quite so keen on uncurling herself before her morning walk.

The great thing about sudden cold weather, though, is wildlife.  "Cold-blooded" animals aren't ready to hibernate yet, but the chilly temperatures make them slow down.  While weeding, I got a great shot of a tiny Pickerel Frog.  Usually, Pickerel Frogs are the fastest amphibians on our farm, pushing off with those long hind legs and disappearing before my mind even registers "frog."  But not today!

We started putting the foundation together for our upcoming 8x16 workshop/bath house today.

The ground needs to be built up in a few places and pounding it with the back of the new shovel seems to do the trick nicely.

Liquid nails.

More liquid nails.

And still yet a bit more of the liquid nails to the time battered roof of our trailer. Each dab of glue getting us that much closer to a completely leak proof home.

I was working on a small structure to protect the firewood today. Stage 1 is to obtain 4 really long posts to work as the frame. It will be like a mini pole barn without the walls.

Reducing our nearby cedar tree population has been on the list of things to do for a while due to the fungal disease known as cedar apple rust.

It's always especially sweet when you can get 2 things marked off the list with just one task, although we still have several more cedars that need to come down.

Now that it's over, I think I understand the point of a wedding.  It's the one time in your life when you can count on the people you care about to show up together and at least look each other in the eye --- the bare minimum for community formation.  Mark's uncle and my dad talked about tinkers, my college buddy and my brother talked about Debian, and every sibling I own came together under one picnic shelter for a few hours.

Although to many women, their wedding is their "big day," I now realize that in a proper world the ceremony is not really about the bride and groom.  It's about forming connections between two circles of family and friends, hoping that maybe something will stick.  After a week of angst and tearing out my hair, it's pretty funny that I finally figured out the point of our wedding after the fact!

I couldn't resist the urge to grab the camera for a close up view of my window spider embraced in a fierce battle with a wasp 3 times its size.

After several tries I got lucky and seemed to have captured the moment when the spider demonstrates control by securing all the legs of the wasp into one spot as if he's been handcuffed. You can notice less fight in the buzz of his wings and an overall feeling of giving up.

If you listen close you can hear the mule garden deer deterrent in the background.

If Mark and I seem a bit flaky this week, it's because we're planning a big party for four or five dozen of our closest friends and relatives on Saturday.  We figured we owed them a get-together for running off to get married in secret last December.  My original goal was to grow a lot of the food for the picnic ourselves, but it seemed that every crop I earmarked for the party --- tomatoes, potatoes, etc. --- failed miserably.  So we've been buying a lot of food, and tidying up the farm so that it looks more presentable.

Throwing a party for masses of people where I'll have to be the center of attention is up there on my list of nightmares (right after being a long distance truck driver, in case you're curious.)  So I've been using mowing therapy to keep myself calm.  My favorite method of mowing is to spend time up front getting the difficult edges so that I can then walk in easy circle after circle, ending up smack dab in the center of the area.  I wish it was so simple to find the exact center of worry circles....

Since this is a homesteading blog, not an angst blog, I'll end with a little factoid.  We took the mulching bag off the mower for my therapy this week because the grass is starting to go to seed.  As someone (Everett?) warned us when we first got our mower, grass clippings only make great mulch when there are no weed seeds involved!  If your lawn is made up of cool season grasses, chances are they're going to seed now too, so put those clippings in the worm bin or on the compost pile (or just let them fall back down and feed the lawn.)

 

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?

Summer and fall are starting to intertwine in the woods, just like they are in the garden.  Our "unused" 56 acres really pull their weight, providing us with unlimited natural beauty and a great buffer from our neighbors.

That said, a few neighbors made the half mile trek back to our trailer Saturday afternoon, beers in hand.  One suggested that we could sell the siding from our hundred year old barn for $17 per board foot.  This price seems phenomenal to me --- could it have been the beer speaking?  Surely our barn isn't worth tens of thousands of dollars?

Don't forget to check out the homemade chicken waterer that makes this possible.

I woke up just before dawn on Thursday, shocked that the sky wasn't yet awake at 6:30 am.  Even after the sun came up, it stayed behind the hill, settling already into its sulky winter pattern.  I was able to weed in the shade until 11 am --- which I have to admit felt pretty good given current warm temperatures!

This is our upper garden, where the tomatoes have been ripped out and replaced by seeds for fall crops.  Still, the garden is very alive with okra, corn, cucumbers, herbs, and next year's strawberries.  Peas and carrots have come up, but I think I may have to replant a couple of beds due to the cats getting excited by the soft bare soil....

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

We're in the midst of harvest season on the farm, gorging ourselves on things like cucumbers, watermelons, and lettuce while freezing masses of everything else.  So far this week, I've put away a quart of okra, a gallon of green beans, and about half a gallon each of pesto and pizza sauce.  Still on the horizon for tomorrow are broccoli and more green beans.

Despite plenty of other farm chores, I stole Wednesday afternoon to visit the intentional community where my movie star neighbor lives.  There, an ex-nun and I splashed in the river, counting critters to determine the water quality.  Stream sampling was my very favorite part about my old job, and I was thrilled to realize that when I'm not getting paid I can do the fun stuff (play in the water and count the bugs!) rather than just training other folks to do them.  In case you're curious, the river passed with flying colors, chock full of mayfly larvae.

It was even fun when the ex-nun's car got stuck in the mud and we had to call the movie star to bring the huge rusty tractor and pull us out.  He and I talked bees while she and I talked blight, then I headed back home to our own harvest.

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

I've been feeling autumn looming all week.  Don't get me wrong --- I love autumn --- but on the farm autumn means that winter will be here soon.  No more drifting through summer.  It's time to get serious about stocking up the harvest, burying our water line the rest of the way, finding firewood, and building our shed.

For this weekend, though, I'm just enjoying the floral abundance.  The seeds I tossed in the ground this summer are finally starting to bloom, like the brilliant red zinnia on the right.  At the edges of the woods, goldenrod, joe-pye-weed, wingstem, thistles, jewelweed, and ironweed are blazing.

In the garden, we're eating our first crisp lettuce with none of the summer bitterness.  Butternut squash vines are dying back as sugars concentrate in their fruits and the last of our staggered corn plantings is starting to tassle.  Even the air is starting to smell of autumn --- that first tang of falling leaves.  The dog days of summer are over.  It's all downhill from here.

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

Based on your assessment of the property, it's time to make some long term plans.  These plans don't have to be set in stone, of course, but they will definitely help you prioritize which areas to work on first and will prevent you from having to move your fruit trees three times.

Start out with a ten year plan.  What are your goals for the next decade?  To grow all of your own food?  To live in a forest garden?  To be running a chicken hatchery as your full time job?  What physical changes to the property will those goals entail?  Break your goals down into manageable chunks and prioritize each one.

Do you plan to build any new structures?  If so, where will they be?  Do you need to bury water lines or build driveways?  These steps will be easiest if you put them early in your long range plan rather than trying to bury a water line through your vegetable garden, the way we did.

If you want to have an orchard, pasture, or garden, it's best to start planning them now.  If possible, plan your trees where they will shade your house in the summer but won't block passive solar heating in the winter.  Gardens are most effective if they are very close to the house so that you can step out the door and pull a weed.  Make a copy of your map and add your long range goals onto it.

When we finally moved onto the farm, I had spent years dreaming and planning about what I wanted our eventual homestead to look like.  I was so excited to be realizing my dream that I started planting things willy-nilly, with the result that a lot of my early effort went for naught.  I wish I'd had the foresight to spend a few days assessing my property before beginning on any of the projects.

If I could go back in time, my first step would be to make a map of the farm.  Since most of my property is wooded, I'd just focus on the areas we plan to to farm for now.  Within that area, I'd map existing structures, water sources (well and creeks), power and telephone lines, septic systems and/or sewer lines, and driveways.  I'd also keep my eye out for existing cultivated fields, orchards, or pastures.  Fences are very useful --- put those on the map.

Next, I'd start thinking about the land as a farm.  Which areas are flat or have little slope?  Which areas have good soil or poor soil?  It's very much worth it to send off some soil samples to the extension service to find out if your soil needs help in certain areas.  But you can also learn a lot by just looking at what's currently growing in an area --- blackberry brambles are a good sign because they mean your soil is relatively rich, while broomsedge is sign of worn out soil.  You should use high quality soil for your garden and orchard, if possible.

That's a wonderful question, Naomi!  The truth is that when I bought our farm, my head was in a similar state.  As a result, it took us years to actually move here.  After that we wasted a lot of time running around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to figure out where to start.  Hopefully we can save you from making the same mistakes.

Before we dive right into the specifics, I'd like to point you to a previous lunchtime series on the top qualities you'll need to be a successful homesteader.  I'm going to stick to the nitty gritty in this week's lunchtime series, but it's worth cultivating the qualities I recommend there too --- moderate strength, frugality, ties in the community, and pacing.

  

A heavy duty tarp has a million uses on a farm. Don't waste your time or money on the lower grade tarps that barely last a few months before they start showing signs of wear.

We put ours to use today on the roof over a trouble spot that insists on leaking in the middle of our kitchen. With any luck it will stay dry long enough to finish up the repair tomorrow.

We installed a new Y splitter to create an additional sprinkler zone for the garden.

It's made of metal with plastic coating. We started out using one made entirely of plastic, which was a mistake I won't repeat again.

The plastic version sometimes leaked and eventually cracked.

The goal is to have the irrigation system down to just turning a valve off and another one on to switch zones. This way we can save more time for weeding and other wonderful activities on the farm.

I heartily believe that about 85% of Americans shouldn't have credit cards.  If you've ever paid a fee on your credit card, it's costing you money.  If you've ever used a credit card to pay for an "emergency expense" you should cut it up now.  If you don't obsessively comb over your credit card bill every month to check every charge, dispute any problem, then pay your bill in full, you might as well stick with cash.  Of course, if you mind having all of your intimate purchasing details in the hands of a big company, you should skip this tip too.

But, for the other 15% of you, sign up for a Discover card and start raking in the cash.  Discover has a cashback program which gives you 1% to 5% of your purchases back as just plain cash.  Don't fall for their affiliate program where you can turn your cashback into purchases at your favorite stores --- those are impulse buys and you don't need that stuff.

To make a Discover card work for you, I believe you should have 3 to 6 months of emergency money stashed away in a savings account.  That's the money you spend if something drastic and terrible happens, rather than pulling out your Discover card.

That said, use your Discover card for every other possible purchase.  We keep our expenses very low, but still end up getting nearly $200 of free money every year.  If you're keeping track at home, that's an infinite return on our investment since we didn't spend any extra money to get it.

To be completely honest, I started cutting Mark's hair because I went with him to his hair appointment and didn't like seeing strange women running their fingers through his hair.  Unfortunately, short-haired folks like Mark need their hair cut every couple of weeks or they start looking shaggy. 

But a trip to the big city every two weeks to shell out $20 and watch that jealously guarded head become public property was too much for me to bear.  So, instead, I trotted down to Rite-Aid and bought an electric razor like this one for less than the cost of one haircut.  It comes with attachments which cut hair at several different lengths, making it pretty simple to keep Mark looking movie-star perfect on the farm.  (Just be sure to keep the blade oiled.)  I figure we've seen about a 2,000% return on our investment so far --- pretty good!

My day in the sun has finally come --- at long last, it's cool to be a skinflint.  Everyone suddenly wants to save money, and the simple living magazines are scurrying to tell us all how to be more frugal.  I heartily agree with all of their tips (which I can't seem to find on the internet), but I know that most folks aren't going to make huge changes in their lives in the interest of frugality.  Instead, this week's lunchtime series offers four ways to save money without really changing your lifestyle.

If you put all four of my tips into practice, you could have an extra $1,000 (or more) in your pocket every year.  Whoa!  What will you do with all that extra cash?  If you're doing well, why not tithe 10% of the excess to a charity you believe in?  Here are some of my favorite charities to get you started:

• The Clinch Coalition
• The Sierra Club
• Appalachian Voices
• Appalachian Community Fund
• National Public Radio
• Population Media Center

Remember --- think globally, act locally!

  

We've just made an improvement to our archive section of the website. Now you can easily read all previous entries back to back until you're caught up and feeling the full force of the Walden Effect.

The homesteading dream is all about freedom.  The homesteading life is all about figuring out what to do with that freedom.

Mark is a great one for reminding me to fill my life with what is truly important --- family, friends, good books, long baths, walking in the woods, and petting Huckleberry.  Your list may vary.

There is only one success, to be able to spend your life in your own way.

--- Christopher Morely

Getting to experience nearly every day with the person I love is what makes me truly rich.

Two hour lunchbreaks, excitedly brainstorming project ideas.  Full days in the garden working in synchrony.  Spur of the moment trips brimming with fun and laughter.

I watch our strengths together bypass our individual weaknesses.

This grand old toad was hiding under the golf cart one day this month.  As I tempted her toward safety, I could nearly hear the toad admonishing me.  "What's the big rush?  Slow down!  Smell the flowers!"

I get so carried away by our grand vision and the endless nitty gritty it takes to get there.  But isn't the Walden Effect really about the intangible beauty and serenity of living on the land?

As Guillaume Apollinaire once said:

So, this week's lunchtime series is a photo journey toward homestead happiness.  Enjoy!

Remember that book I was typing away at six months ago?  Well, I started it in the rain and I finished it in the rain.  Wednesday's stormy weather gave me the incentive to slog through the second round of editing, which I hope will be the last time I do anything major with it.  Now it's in the hands of my collaborators, who will work on formatting and a last round of editing.

I hope to see an actual physical book in my hands by the end of the summer, early fall at the latest.  Even though the book is mostly local interest (it's a combination trail guide and explanation of central Appalachian ecology), I'll let you know when copies are out and looking for a new home.

I finally got around to ripping the bathtub out of our miniscule bathroom this weekend and lugged it outside under the sun.  By winter, I hope to have constructed a simple bathing chamber out there with glass walls, a passive solar water heater, and a simple graywater system.  For now, I'm just thrilled to be able to soak in a bathtub rather than in the washtub.  (Yes, I used to wash up outdoors in the washtub rather than indoors in the bathtub --- I just don't like bathing indoors if there's another choice.)

Sunday in a nutshell --- a plethora of library books to choose between, a purring cat to pet, double chocolate chip cookies, and a bathtub in the great outdoors.  Is there really anything better in this world?

I'm always excited when our readers email me interesting suggestions for simple living.  In fact, I've had three great bits of information sitting in my inbox for nearly a month, just waiting to be turned into a lunchtime series.  Unfortunately, three never grew to four, so I kept putting it off. 

Luckily, another tip came in just this morning.  I hope you enjoy this week's gems of homesteading wisdom!

I wandered into Mark's room and saw that he was listening to the Agroinnovations podcast.  "Tell us more about your back to the land story," I heard.

Then Mark's voice popped out of the computer.  "Well, like a lot of stories, it starts with a girl..."

Awww! :-)  I had to listen to the whole thing, and I hope you will too.  This was the first time Mark had been interviewed for a podcast, so he was a bit nervous.  But I suspect you'll like hearing his story as much as I did.

Episode 53: The Walden Effect with Mark Hamilton.

As part of our recession-proof income diversification, I've been leading a group of ecotourists around the area this week.  I've had a blast, getting paid to wander around in the woods identifying flowers.  If I weren't such an introvert that I require an hour of decompression for each hour I spend in the company of people, I'd do this more often.

After three inches of rain in a week, the creek finally rose.  Now, I want you to imagine us carrying three boxes of buzzing bees (screened boxes, not cardboard boxes) across this footbridge.  Then hopping across those stepping stones and scrambling up a muddy bank.  It was quite an adventure!

We enjoyed a wonderfully rainy weekend.  About an inch and a half fell over the course of two days --- the perfect speed to soak the soil and sprout those seeds I planted last week.

I also put our house plants outside to harden off in the rain.  Cloudy skies mean relatively warm nighttime temperatures, so I can be lazy and leave the plants out all night.  Usually, hardening off is a maddening series of carrying your plants out in the day and in at night, worrying about too much sun and too much cold.  Our citrus in their five gallon pots are not a joy to relocate over and over, so I am thrilled to get to go the lazy route.

Meanwhile, the US Drought Monitor tells me that the extreme southwest tip of Virginia, where we live, has finally popped out of drought conditions.  Awesome!!!!  Thanks, rain!

Sunday afternoon, I caught a colony of ants launching themselves from shelf fungi for a mating flight.

A tiger beetle flew from sunpatch to sunpatch in the floodplain.

Wading down the creek, I was captivated by water strider shadows.

(See a larger version of the images on my Imagekind page.)

A couple of you have asked me if you can be notified when new comments are posted on a blog entry.  I told you "no", but it turns out that, unbeknownst to me, there's been a way to do that all along.  When you make a comment on a post, you'll notice that there's a little button at the top of the completed comment which says "RSS".  Click there and you'll be able to subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments, just the way you can subscribe to an RSS feed of our blog.  If you want to be notified every time there are comments on any post, click "Recent Comments" on the sidebar to the left, then click on the "RSS" button at the top of the page you get sent to.

While I'm on a technical note, I'm hoping one of you can help me out with formatting our blog in Internet Explorer.  I highly recommend that everyone use Firefox (or, really, any browser except IE) since Firefox is faster, free, and protects you from web-borne viruses.  But I'm aware that the 50% of you who use IE get a messed up format from our blog --- the sidebar looks twice as big as it should which makes the pictures eat our words.  If anyone out there is adept at finding a way to work around IE's problems with tables, please drop me an email and I'll send you our template to look at.  I'd be eternally grateful!

Once in a while, I ponder what it would be like to live in the tropics, where I could grow fresh food year round.  At other times, I marvel over the deep snow of the north.  But the truth is that I adore our seasons so much that I couldn't live anywhere else for long.

Yes, this is another spring adoration post.  Trilling toads in the night!  Tulip-trees just starting to put out yellow-green leaves.  White dashes of serviceberry and pink patches of redbud on the hillside.  Dogwood flowers unfurling outside our window.  And the hillsides alive with the sound...er, color...of trilliums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Home,

home,

home,

home,

HOME


Okay, so I promise you a post with substance tomorrow.  Let me just tell you that in the last five days, the farm has turned so green it took my breath away.

We are so glad to be back!

I got so excited by the marvelous world of gluten that I forgot to mention that there will be no lunchtime series this week.  Mark and I are hitting the road tomorrow for a trip to the "north" (Pennsylvania) to visit a bunch of friends.  Blogging will be sporadic until Sunday when we are home again.

Luckily, my brother is able to come babysit the farm --- thanks, Joey!  The one problem with having 13 animals depending on you is that you can't just run off on a whim, even if you plan your life so that you otherwise could.  Be forewarned!

In addition to the napkins Brandy made us, we also bought a slew of very sturdy cloth grocery bags from her a few months ago.  Mark, like Mike, had a really hard time taking the leap away from paper towels, but for me the grocery bags are the largest challenge.

People do look at you funny when you bring your own grocery bags to the store in rural America, but the really hard part is remembering to bring in the bags in the first place.  We've figured out a few simple tricks which help us steer clear of plastic:

• Keep the cloth grocery bags in the car.  When you live a ten minute walk from your car and a fifteen minute drive from the grocery store, chances are you won't go back to pick up forgotten bags stashed under the kitchen sink.
  
• Put "cloth bags" on the grocery list and circle it.  Nothing like a reminder when you get to the store.
• Put Mark in charge of the grocery shopping --- he has the memory and is far more likely to remember the bags!

Good luck --- and remember that every little step you make away from disposables is one step toward self-sufficiency!

(Editor's note from Anna --- the sanitary pad article yesterday was by Brandy too, of course.  I just put my name on it accidentally!)

Tell folks you use cloth diapers and immediately get looks of surprise, horror and disgust.  Yes, I use cloth, but these are not your mother's diapers.  They're much more absorbent, especially for night-time --- the only leaks I've had have been from disposables.  There's nothing creepier in the morning than pulling off a diaper heavy with the cellulose gel that disposables are filled with.  Cloth diapers can easily pay for themselves in a year or less, depending on the type you use, and there are few things more gratifying than knowing you will never run out. 

Everything you ever needed to know about diapers....

Have a happy period.

If you've got television, you've most likely seen the Always commercial telling you how their plastic pads are going to make your life easier, fresher, and yes, happier.  The truth is, plastic disposable pads aren't all that great--they're full of all sorts of chemicals, very pricey and make weird noises in public restrooms.  They're also totally not breathable and they're boring.  Yup, I said boring. 

Cloth pads make sense in many ways.  They're a much greener choice--no weird gels to soak up exponential amounts of Aunty Flo, no pads piling up in your local landfill.  They're highly breathable and I no longer experience the grown-up diaper rash that I had with plastic pads.  Some women find their periods are shorter and lighter with cloth pads, and this has been true for me.  Like other cloth items such as napkins and diapers, you buy or make them once and use them for years.  You can even use them postpartum.  For less than $200, you can have menstrual protection to last five years or more. 

Now to the unboring part....

Is there life after paper towels?

When I first suggested to Mike that we stop using paper towels, he was skeptical.  It's easy to see why--they're the go-to fix for almost any mess.  Tear one off to clean up a spill on the floor or use them to drain our beloved bacon.  It was a hard sell, harder in fact than any other green switch we made.  But really, it's so easy and inexpensive to replace your paper towels with more sustainable options....

When I was young in the mountains, I sewed cloth napkins on my 1946 Singer sewing machine.  I made red plaid ones for Italian meals and fun butterflies for Summer feasts.  I carefully packed them away. . .

Now that I am married and we have our own home, the napkins are being well used and I've added quite a few more to the collection.  Three years in, do cloth napkins have a practical use in the home?  You bet!  We love using cloth napkins and our guests feel extra special when they stay for meals.  They're a simple, frugal solution to multi-napkin meals (like ribs and fried chicken) and at-the-table spills.  We're not tired of folding them and when we ate meals away from home, I packed them in lunches.  They're also a great way to entertain babies honing their fine motor skills.

How do you get started?  Here's a few tips....

We've decided to add 5 medium daffodil bulbs and some chamomile plants to this month's giveaway.

With any luck your 5 flower bulbs will multiply into a small daffodil army within 10 years if you take the time to separate them out once they get big enough to reproduce.

Those of you with long memories will recall that I was thinking of printing up some notecards with Walden Effect images on them a few weeks ago.  That got bogged down in my native distaste for marketing --- I love making art, but the matting, framing, and selling sides of it drive me nuts.

Then the internet came to my rescue!  Imagekind lets me upload my images, then they turn them into prints of various sizes or notecards whenever someone asks for them.  It's a win-win situation --- I get to share my art and bring in a little spending money without having to find a clean, dry place in our tiny trailer to store boxes of prints and notecards.  (Be forewarned that I never physically touch the art, so I obviously can't sign the prints.)  Best of all, you can set up a free account as long as you don't want more than 24 images up there.

So, if you'd like to send a little Walden Effect to your friends, check out our Imagekind page.  And that's it for our monthly dose of advertising.

When March begins, the speedwells and dead nettle and bittercress start to bloom in the yard.  Then come the first tree flowers --- elm and maple twigs with little blooms you would hardly notice unless you were looking for them.  But for me, spring isn't really here until the first early spring ephemerals pop up in the woods.  Monday was the day!  I found a grand total of two hepaticas, each semi-closed in the rain, but I know that by next week at this time the woods will be brimming with life!

The weather has cooled back down, which is probably a good thing since spring was starting to feel a bit like a runaway mule.  I haven't pruned the rest of my fruit trees yet, but the peach buds are already starting to swell and show their first signs of color (green, not pink yet.)  As you can see, the wild hazels I plan to transplant into my forest garden are already in full bloom.  Whoa, whoa, whoa!

For those of you with fruit trees already starting to bloom (Mom, Daddy), here's a very useful chart to show you which temperatures can harm them.  It's worth watching the weather forecast and your fruit tree buds very carefully at this time of year, since you can often protect trees in an emergency by covering them with
sheets or even turning on a sprinkler.  We can't have a repeat of last year's fruitless summer!

While Mark finishes up King Corn and I finish up Letters from the Hive, I thought I'd take this chance to get to know all of our new readers.  Time for a poll!  Feel free to add any additional thoughts in the comments section.

Spring has come --- if you forgot to Spring Ahead last night, now's the time to change your clocks!

Meanwhile, I'm revelling in the beautiful weather.  We're only about 80% through our water-line-burying project, but it's so warm that our frozen lines thawed out.  I was able to fill up the washtub and do laundry without hoisting five gallon buckets of water out of the tank!  Now that's spring!

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?

Today was very wet. Constant rain is just what I needed to troubleshoot the intermittent electrical trouble on the 1990 Ford Festiva.

Luckily today was moist enough to provoke the problem, which is the engine turning over but not starting, or when it does start it sometimes stalls.

It seems like I fixed it by unplugging the main distributor wire from the ignition coil and firmly re-seating it back into place. I drove it all afternoon in the pouring rain with no other problems. I think I may add a bead of silicone to the connector cover to decrease the chance of any more moisture getting inside. The real test will be to see if the problem doesn't pop up again next week or next month.

It seems like this winter has been abnormally cold --- all of the neighbors agree, although I haven't actually crunched the numbers to find out if it's true.  We were all ready for spring during last week's stunning bout of sun and warmth.  Time to wash loads of laundry and dry them on the line, rip off our long johns, and bask in the sun.

Of course, it is still February and cold weather is with us again.  Luckily, spring has begun and I can let the snowdrops, the singing birds, and the early morning sun remind me of that fact.  Even the daffodils are starting to poke up.  Soon....

I hope you've had fun exploring the world of barnyard tracks!  If you want to learn more about tracking, here are two of my favorite tracking books:

Peterson's Field Guide to the Mammals --- This isn't really a tracking book, but drawings of tracks are scattered throughout.  I photocopied all of the common ones onto one 11X14 sheet of paper --- perfect for carrying out on the field on a snowy day!

Field Guide to Tracking Animals in the Snow --- Once again, I photocopied out one overview page which I carry with me in the field.  It breaks tracks down into walkers and bounders, and then gives you hints to distinguish species from there.

Enjoy!

I finished up stage two of the footbridge repair today by hammering some metal fence posts deep into the ground to serve as an anchor for the support base.

Some concrete mixed into the holes makes a good bond with the top of the fence post and hopefully will hold during the next heavy water incident.

Once you've learned the cats, the dogs, and the bounders, you've really learned the most common tracks.  Here are a few more common and/or distinctive tracks you should be aware of.   (I had to forage for some of these images from the internet --- click to see their source.)






The deer is impossible to confuse with any other species (unless you live in an area with moose or elk.)  The divided hooves may or may not have small back hooves showing.

Read more....

If you guessed dog for yesterday's mystery track (shown here), you were right.  It's actually two tracks on top of each other, but not exactly registering, making the track look longer than it actually is and muddying the shape.  But the nails in the front give it away.  Domestic dog!

Now to those pesky bounders.  When I see a set of two or four tracks together with a big space between, I usually haul out my primary tracking tool --- the ruler.  The teensy tiny bounder tracks are shrews, mice, or voles.  Next size up comes chipmunks, then squirrels, then rabbits.  Be sure to measure both the length of the tracks and the space between each set of tracks --- both are distinctive.  Read more....

Now that you can tell your walkers from your bounders, let's take a look at two major walker groups --- the canines and the felines.  You'll have plenty of opportunity to work on telling them apart when you track your household pets, and the knowledge you'll gain there will carry over into figuring out if a fox, bobcat, coyote, or mountain lion is lurking around your henhouse.  Basically, large or small, a cat is a cat and a dog is a dog.

One of each to get you started.  Which is a cat and which is a dog?  Click for the answer...

I've felt so alive ever since I recovered from my bout of food poisoning.  The world seems brighter, clearer...and I want to post constantly.  Bear with me.  I'm sure I'll get jaded soon.

Tonight is the full moon and I couldn't resist sharing a few of my first night photos.  I haven't quite figured out all the settings on the camera, but the photos turned out interesting nonetheless.

Earlier (in daylight), I watched a Song Sparrow muddle through its first song of the spring as it perched on a fencepost.  The bird seemed a bit confused, leaving out the distinctive first three notes and settling into the warbling part with vigor.  The cats even got into the spring weather, begging to be let out repeatedly.  No couch sitters on the farm today!

With all of the snow we've been getting this winter, I thought now might be a good time to talk about one of my favorite snowy activities --- tracking.  I've decided to call this lunchtime series "Farm Tracking 101" because I'll cover all of the basics you need to tell your chicken tracks from your dog tracks and to figure out who's been nosing around your chicken coop.  I'll mention my favorite books and tools later, but for now, let's dive right in!

Take a look at the two photos below.  Yup, I've intentionally made them too small to tease apart the shape of individual tracks.  But you can probably tell they're made by two different animals, right?  Read more...

Lest you think the simple life is all farm fresh eggs and sunny afternoons, I have to admit there are darker days.  I whipped up some tuna salad on Tuesday which really didn't agree with us --- in fact, it disagreed with me so much that I ended up throwing up at 3 am in the snow.  And at 4 am.  And at 10 am.  And at noon.

Mark was less visibly affected, though still weakened by the bad fish.  He was able to keep the fire going while all I was able to do was pull on my coat for the endless treks outside.  Thursday, we were each a bit perkier --- I made it to the sofa instead of spending all day in bed, and Mark even managed to go get some fresh wood.  But we're both a bit under the weather, which is why my posts have been a bit low on details.  I figured you really don't want a photo of Lucy excitedly licking up frozen vomit....

Even on the darkest days, though, the simple life doesn't lose its appeal.  Sure, I haven't quite gotten up the strength to heat wash water to bathe with, but I had two warm cats on my chest Thursday morning who seem to have imbued me with their energy.  It's nice to know that all we really need is someone able-bodied enough to keep the home fires burning and feed the animals --- everything else is optional.

Here's another view of our homemade footbridge taken this evening.

I'm going through a phase lately where I want to replace it with a set of ziplines, although I'm not sure if Lucy would be up for such a ride?

I took this picture today in the middle of my evening walk with Lucy.

I've heard from four separate people around here that this bridge is haunted by an older lady wearing a long night gown, although I have yet to speak to anybody who's actually seen anything ghost like.

Maybe someday I'll get lucky and snap a picture of said ghost in the future, if there is actually any such thing?

Another inch and a quarter of rain fell Tuesday, sending me scurrying to the USGS website to check in on our drought conditions.  Here in southwest Virginia, we're still in a moderate drought --- I dream of downgrading to abnormally dry.

We just need 6 to 9 inches of rain in the next month to end this drought.  If drought amelioration were a fundraising campaign, I could totally work with those numbers, but I'm afraid that my pep talks will hold little sway over the weather.

I found out recently that you can listen to the Writer's Almanac for free at their website and catch up on past shows that you've missed.

It's a five minute gem of a radio show that always seems to educate, entertain, and inspire me with its style and content.

I love the way he weaves in yummy slices of historical trivia, for example, "On this day in 1978, the Commerce Department, which oversees the National Weather Service, announced that hurricanes would no longer be named exclusively for women."

The smooth voice of Garrison Keillor is the host of the show and he always signs off with the warm greeting "Be well, do good work, and stay in touch." It's like hearing from your favorite English teacher on what's got him or her excited that day without the annoying kid in the back throwing spit balls.

I'm thinking of printing notecards using some of my recent photographs.  It's hard to choose photos that will look good small since I've seen them all large, though, so I'm hoping to get some advice from those of you who can see the images with fresh eyes.  Thanks in advance for your input!

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(Wrapped around both the front and back of the notecard.)

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(Wrapped around both the front and back of the notecard.)