Why Am I Doing This?

 

 

 There is one word that definitely does not describe my new life here on the farm, and that word is "convenient." Things are very inconvenient here.

I am 26 miles from the nearest Taco Bell, about 10 miles from the nearest dinky grocery store, and 83 miles from the office of my doctor in Dallas. The nearest fast food is the Dairy Queen in Cooper, about 10 miles away. However, unlike most fast food in Dallas, their food is good, abundant and cheap.

In order to get my mail I have to hike a football field's length through waist-high weeds. I bought snakebite leggings because I once saw a 5 foot long snake here at close range, not quite as big around as my wrist. I didn't identify the type. When I get larger Amazon deliveries, which surprisingly I can get here, I have to truck a wheelbarrow over the overgrown path to the mailbox in order to convey it back to the house.

I poop on a custom-made toilet frame, under which lies a bucket with a lid. When the bucket fills up, I take it out to the compost pile, dump it out, rinse out the bucket and let it dry in the sun. When it is time for it to go inside again, I put grasses or hay in the bottom and it is ready to go again. No plumbers needed. ;)

When I need to do the dishes, or take a bath, this involves hauling buckets of water in from the only faucet out front and heating the water on the stove. Baths can take me 4 hours sometimes. Because my sinks are as small as those used in RV's, I have a big metal washtub to soak the dishes in. Dishes however are way easier than LAUNDRY. I do laundry in a big igloo icebox, scraping the clothes against an old-fashioned washboard, squeezing them out, rinsing them out with a hose attached to the one faucet out front, and I hang them on a clothesline slung between two trees. Out there with the wasps and the beautiful butterflies and the giant spiders and the dragonflies the size of small birds.

If you want a convenient life, I can say emphatically THIS IS NOT IT.

If you want a free life however, this is it. I am very free. My life is remarkably free of bullshit.

There are several interconnected reasons why I am here. The most basic, practical and direct reason is, I do not get along well with people. I am not well adjusted to society, which I am arrogantly inclined to think of as more society's fault than mine. If you want to do well in the cities, you need money and lots of it. This means that either you need to charm and persuade people to give you work because you are such a likeable person, and/or you need to have skills that are in constant demand. And the funny thing about skills in demand are, people tend to catch on that certain skills pay better and so they try to gain those skills too. Also, skills in demand have a talent for suddenly not being much in demand at all. So you can find yourself moving from being a technical brahmin to a nobody with remarkable ease. Urban life is inherently unstable. Since I am the inverse of charming and view persuasiveness as virtually a sin, and don't have skills so remarkable as to make people overlook my prickly exterior, I am sitting on my savings and growing vegetables and living spartan. Not to mention the fact that once an employer gets a good look at my politics and theology, they are going to welcome me into their corporate family about like they would welcome contagious leprosy.

There is another interconnected set of reasons relating to the malignant influences of urban life. Cities have been considered wicked since biblical times. I believe they are, in general terms, bad for morals, bad for human life, bad for raising children, and bad for the planet.

Back when I used to bike to visit my mother in the nursing home, I would always pass by a certain liquor store. In front of the liquor store there was a certain patch of grass between the parking lot and the highway; a very sad patch of grass. It was not unkempt, if only that were the case it would have been less sad. It was mown regularly, and between the sun beating off the parking lot and the heat radiating off the highway it was very sad and lackluster. It was living in the worst of both worlds: nobody would take care of it (in the holistic sense, doing what was good for it) and neither would they leave it alone to take care of itself. It was a small thing, but to me it radiated the same meaninglessness and alienation as the rest of urban life did. There was no love, no care for it. Not even Nature was allowed to care for it.

I know it was a small thing, a patch of ground. But to me it was The City in a capsule. Hatred of meaning, hatred of life itself, all in a patch of scorched earth. Hostile to Nature, hostile to G-d Himself.

I am sure I have spoken elsewhere about how bad industrialized agriculture is for the planet, so I will just drop that in under the category of being bad for the planet. Here on my land, either I am taking care of an area or Nature is being left alone to take care of it. And as a result, life is extremely abundant. More so, than any place I have ever seen. It is the opposite of that sad listless patch of grass.

Bad for human life? There are so many dimensions of this, but just for starters, instability is bad for human life. Nothing is keeping you from losing your job or even everyone or mass numbers of people from losing their jobs. Humans are replaceable by machines in many cases, and more so each day. And then without work you starve, or almost as bad, you make the run of soup kitchens and homeless shelters while experiencing the worst that urban life has to offer. A real and hopeless hell. That ain't good. That is very very bad.

One of my favorite parables about the instability of human economics is that during the Great Depression, apples still grew on trees, chickens still clucked on the grass and laid eggs, and wheat still grew in the fields. The Earth may have taken a knock in the Dust Bowl, but on the whole the country was still able to feed us. It was the human system that failed. And it can fail again, at any time.

Even the good parts of urban life can be bad. Comfort, convenience, is bad for human development. Everyone likes a little comfort and convenience sometimes, but when it becomes a way of life it creates human beings who are unable to stand up to or stand up FOR anything. Molluscs who have no principles greater than their pillows. Humans must be many things, but one of the things they must be capable of being, is warriors. In physical, intellectual or spiritual struggle, strength develops through DIScomfort, and to be a warrior either literally or against the things we must struggle against in this life, is uncomfortable. Wrestling with the natural world makes us strong. Comfort makes us weak.

Bad for children? Well, only if gangs, drugs, alcohol, fast food, diabetes, public nudity, alienation, porn and nihilism are bad for them. Regular exposure to nature on the other hand promotes good qualities. Independence, wonder, curiosity, confidence.

Bad for morals? It seems that the more humans are separated from nature and natural life, the more deviant they become, inventing new degenerate ways of life all the time and holding them up as paragons of progression. In nature, life and energy are the currencies and every living thing seeks to expand its life and increase its energy. In the city, money is the currency and experiences are the things to be desired. Even if the experiences, like drug use, are destructive to oneself, others, or the planet.

Another reason I am here: I believe that evil has consequences. In the Bible this is usually described as G-d's wrath, such as fell on Sodom and Gomorrah, or fell on the Kingdom of Israel and later on the Kingdom of Judah. But whether you consider it G-d's wrath or natural law, I think we are long overdue for a "reset," and not the kind the World Economic Forum has in mind. Economic or civil or natural or political catastrophe. I think that is far overdue, that Covid is barely a down-payment on it, and if it happens in my lifetime, the last place I would want to ever be is in a city.

And so here I am, a hermit in the country. If I am not quite John the Baptist eating grasshoppers, I am not that far off either. ;) It is not convenient or comfortable, but it is good.

 

 

 

Keyhole and farm plan changes

Well, live and adapt. This land is going to be way too soggy, especially in the Spring, to do the kind of no-till garden I was originally planning. I imagine it dries out towards summer, but by then I already need to have stuff going.

What I am going to do is build a series of keyhole gardens. They will be composed of wire mesh set into the ground with PVC stakes (because I happen to have both things on hand.) Because I don't want to dig the quantity of soil that would be necessary to fill the approximately 2-3 foot tall by 10 foot in diameter garden bed, I am initially going to fill the whole thing with "hay." The quotes on the hay are because what I am actually talking about is whatever dead vegetation I have around here, which is mostly grass but also weeds and such. I would just order a ton of hay, but I have learned from experience that such hay is often grown with herbicides which aren't good for growing other plants in. Hay is grown to feed horses and cows, not grow plants. So to be certain that my hay is herbicide-free, I have to gather what is here, which is grass and weeds and whatnot but definitely nobody has been spraying chemicals on it. This is however rather labor-intensive and requires a number of sunny dry days so I can cut the "hay" with an oversized hedge trimmer, and sunny days are in short supply around here lately.

Now, plants grown in hay alone isn't going to work too great. So once I have the bed entirely filled with hay and it has had a chance to tamp down (and maybe more hay added,) when I plant I am going to make a hole in the hay around each seed or seed cluster and fill said hole with Miracle Gro garden soil.  Then I plant the seeds in it. Over time I add more organic matter until voila! The whole thing is basically soil. The cardboard (weed blocker) underneath the keyhole gardens will break down with time, giving access to the nutrient-rich clay beneath, and meanwhile the grass and weed roots underneath the cardboard will have died and broken down, creating channels for my crop roots.

The immediate problem with this plan is that it is a lot of work and it depends on sunny days for cutting hay that I don't typically have a lot of now. So I might only get a couple of these gardens done in time for spring planting. I am wanting to have many such, but it may be next year before I fully colonize my gardening space with the keyhole gardens. The long-term problem is that the garden walls are made of steel mesh, which will rust over time but I don't anticipate a huge problem with repairing them. Just slap some new steel mesh around the outside. The contents of the garden might also ooze out through the mesh over time: I will be using cardboard initially to help the mesh hold in the contents, but I can anticipate that not lasting a super long time. However the loss of structural integrity of the cardboard can also be a bonus: I can plant stuff like strawberries into the side of the garden on the south-facing side. I have enough of this fiberglass cloth stuff (that was also just lying around on the property) to line one of the garden beds, but not enough for more than that and I am really not wanting to buy more to line the beds.

I have one of the keyhole gardens built and partially filled with hay, but at this point I will be lucky to have it done in time to plant corn in it, especially if the wet weather keeps up. I can get started on the second one at any time since building the wire mesh framework is not weather-dependent, just filling it is. I also have some snow peas starting in a no-till bed but they may get waterlogged.

Live and adapt to the land, that is the ticket.

Preparedness

Me preparing for a Seven Degree Fahrenheit day outdoors

 

The farm in the snow

 
As many probably know, Texas is digging out from a once-in-a-lifetime winter storm. For someone who preaches preparedness, I was not as prepared as I would have liked, but it all worked out in the end. My water stockpile was not filled to capacity when the water went out, but fortunately I did not have to use all that I had. I had maybe a gallon of gas on hand for the generator. Fortunately the power stayed on, for the most part. My footwear proved inadequate to the cold even with two pairs of socks, but now I know and I improvised.

 I had no busted pipes in the house, because all the pipes in my house are already busted and the water cut off from them. I get my water from a faucet out front, which did freeze up but since I left it running, it did not bust the pipe. My toilet did not become nonfunctional because my toilet is a homecrafted toilet frame into which a bucket filled with straw is fitted into. Once filled, it goes out to the compost pile. Low tech is good, lol. My floors may be dirty from the damned ubiquitous clay here, but they aren't flooded. 

If anything I am about to have a hay/straw emergency, lol, but once the roads are more passable I am going to order a big bale of hay, which I am going to need for the garden beds anyway.

Food, I never lost power for long so I have all the food that I would have anyway. Had I lost power, I have an alcohol camp stove and alcohol fuel stored away.

Had the power gone out, heating would have been my Achille's Heel. I didn't have hardly any gasoline stored, and my generator could have handled only one of the two portable heaters I needed to keep my bedroom at tolerable temperatures. The rest of the house has no heat: there is central heating but last time I ran it I got unacceptable heating bills so I assume that the vents in the roof are exposed. In the bedroom, I put in extra insulation but not in the rest of the house. The bedroom was always going to be my bunker if extreme heat or cold occurred anyway. I also put a spring on the bedroom door to keep it closed, otherwise my cat Mango would leave it partway open and all the heat (or cool in summer) would leak out. Fortunately I DID get that done a couple weeks before the storm hit.

Washing hands on the coldest days was a real problem: my water is stored in plastic "watercubes" and if left out in the ambient temperatures would be ice cold when I needed to wash my hands. On some days I heated water on the stove to use for hand washing. On others I just gritted my teeth and endured the icy water on my hands.

I have, ahem, not bathed in quite some time. Bathing is quite a chore when there is no indoor water. It involves heating up a lot of water on the stove and pouring it into the bathtub. Fortunately for 99% of the time there is no one around to experience my, I am sure, overwhelming fragrance, but getting a bath is high on my priority list once temperatures warm up at least into the sixties. Let me tell you, stepping out of the tub into a freezing cold bathroom is an experience you won't want to repeat any time soon.

I stand a good chance of being marooned here for awhile, not because of the ice, but because of when it melts. There's 350 feet between my house and the County Road, and under wet conditions that becomes a mire, a chunky soup of mud. I am going to have a driveway put in once I find a contractor to do it.

On the whole though I have been very blessed. In some ways the worst day of the crisis was today. Once the faucet thawed yesterday, I filled up all my water cubes to put into storage, and also went out and filled up all my gasoline containers, and did a grocery run, and as a result of all that exertion my glutes... my ass, if you will pardon the expression... is so sore that it is painful to walk. The day I melted snow and all the greasy goop from the vent-a-hood got rehydrated and started dripping on my stove and into my snowmelt was bad too, I had to pour out the water I was melting and clean out the pot and rinse it with snow, that kinda sucked.

On the whole though it was a cakewalk. I just stayed indoors and played Skyrim all day. ;) 

I think the conclusions that I have drawn from the experience is that I was not as prepared as I would like to have been (very little gasoline, water cubes not full when it started,) but also that being low-tech or at least being prepared to go low-tech has very great advantages. No toilet pipes were going to bust, I do my #2 in a bucket. When I first moved here, I didn't have water hooked up so I had a full water purification setup going to purify pond water. When I first moved here I ran on generator power, so I have the generator with a power cord that runs from the outside to my bedroom, and gas cans (though I didn't think to stock up on my gasoline.)

I also need a generator that is twice as powerful as that one, 2000 watts is not enough to fully heat my room at temps around zero Fahrenheit, and it is not enough to run the window AC in the bedroom full blast in a heat wave, so I need to order a 4000 watt generator once the roads thaw and I can get deliveries from Amazon again.

Another conclusion: the Ark is a BEAST. :) After sitting and freezing in sometimes below zero temperatures, with 100,000 miles on the odometer, when I went to go drive to the store it just turned right over. Chevy Express vans: don't underestimate em.

On the whole I was blessed by the Lord my G-d and didn't have a particularly rough time of it, and learned many important things from it. I also am in awe of how large 3 acres is and how many resources are in this land to help me. I feel like a king of my own domain here, though in fact G-d is king and I am just a thankful tenant. :) The land is G-d's: I just get to use it.

 

So much to do

 

Mango is on rat duty, but mostly his job is being loved.

 

There are two other cats on Rat Patrol now, so I think rats and mice are going to be less of a problem than I first anticipated. The first visiting ratter is a cat I call Booker, he's clearly not feral or at least was raised in a family at one point. He may have even been raised by the family that used to live here, they may have off and left him because he sure makes himself at home here. The other that I see less frequently is a black cat that is clearly feral. I leave food out for Booker to encourage him to stick around and discourage rodents. I saw an opossum munching on that food last night, so there's a possum too. 

I have so much work to do. I'm not complaining, that's part of what I wanted: meaningful work. Today I need to paint the area behind the decrepit stove and what will be the refrigerator so I can get a new stove and refrigerator delivered. I don't want to leave that area of wall grubby for the foreseeable future. I've got to get more garden beds in. I have to go to Sulphur Springs later in the week to pick up stuff I ordered at Lowes, which includes a tall ladder that I got so I can close up the holes under the eaves. There were like vent holes in the crown of the roof under the eaves, the vents having fallen off, so I need to pick an especially cold morning to go up there and seal up those holes so I don't have wasp city up in there. Also in the order is paper for sheet mulching the garden beds and a wood chipper: the mulch for the beds is primarily "hay" (read: cut grass and weeds) but I need some wood chips for on top of them. So one of these days I am going to have to cut some branches and chip them up.

I need to make a greenhouse: not sure if that is something that is going to get done when I need it which is early in the year but we'll see.

Of course I also still have to paint the rest of the house too, I am just getting the area behind the stove done first so I can get the new stove and fridge put in. At some point I want to pull up the disgusting old carpet and put new linoleum flooring in the whole house: my bedroom is the only room in the house with intact flooring.

Aaaaaand... then I have to tear out the whole kitchen and put in new cabinets and counters. My cabinet space is totally inadequate, my shelving space is inadequate, my drawer space is inadequate and my counter space is inadequate: it needs a total makeover. Not to mention all the holes in the floors and baseboards that need sealing up back there. And not to mention all the other holes in the house that need sealing up before I can paint those walls. So I got work to do.

My thoughts turn more and more to Spring though and getting plants planted. It's not just because I love gardens, but because all my food right now is coming from a Dollar Store and a small grocery store in Cooper. So my diet needs broadening and it needs some greens too. Man does not live by pop-tarts and gruel alone, but I've sure been trying. My diet is crappy: I need to get food growing going on. Getting a proper refrigerator should help, right now I am operating out of a refrigerator that's barely larger than a suitcase. I should be able to start some winter greens in my first garden bed before long.

But this is what I wanted: work that matters to me, as versus work that I do just in order to exist. And all of it does matter to me, even the parts that I wish were just done or that I wish I could just hire someone to do (like tearing down the kitchen: that's going to be a new one for me.)

One positive development: I now have access to water. Every water pipe in this entire house is busted, that's another thing that needs fixing at some point. Previously I had been purifying pond water for drinking and fetching pond water for washing-up, which obviously takes time and is less than ideal. I had plumbers bypass the house altogether and put me in a standing water faucet in the front yard, so now the water is turned on and I can go to the front yard to get County water as versus going to the pond. Still not convenient, but a heck of a lot more so than carrying water from the pond and then putting it through a sand filter, then if I want to drink it boiling it and putting it through a Berkey filter. I took a bath in a big Igloo ice chest filled with heated pond water, that's my technology level right now lol and will be for awhile, with buckets of water from the front yard replacing buckets of water from the pond.

There is a ton of work to do, but I'm glad I'm here.

 

 

Finally at the Farm!

 

I don't call it Yah-haven anymore, doesn't really roll off the tongue. It's Sabbathday Farm. It's not like there's a sign out front or anything. ;)

While 2020 was a terrible year for America, G-d be praised it is also the year that so many of my dreams came true. I am living at the farm full-time now (the house is a bit falling down but at least I'll have plenty to do.) The sale of the house in Dallas is set to close on the 16th, for a very nice sum. I have everything moved out that I needed to (praise G-d! All the moving trips were extremely rough on me, moving everything alone by myself.) And winter has come, which means I have time to deal with the constant onslaught of wasps and other insects that crawl in through the holes of this very porous house. I am both sealing up the holes in the house and also preparing to deal with the wasp problem proactively once the weather warms up. I know wasps are beneficial insects in the garden, but not in my house and not buzzing my front door. Seriously, in warm weather I was killing at least two wasps per day in the house, and I am not sure how they got in except there's an awful lot of holes in this house. There were literal clouds of wasps outside.

I also have a rat problem, but my cat Mango is on the job. Well, mostly.

And I have plots and plans for rat traps. Ultimately I am going to attack the problem at its source, which is that there are a ton of holes leading outside behind the cabinets in the kitchen and I am going to do a complete kitchen teardown and makeover. I need way more counter space, way more cabinets, way more shelves. This kitchen needs to be a well-oiled machine.

I feel very positive about getting this place ready to serve my needs. These are scary times, so many are losing their livelihoods. Originally part of the purpose of me getting a little farm was purely survival: I felt that bad times were inevitable, and I wanted my dwelling paid for and a bit of land and a means of feeding myself if the system failed in some way. I did not anticipate this particular problem, Coronavirus, but I anticipated something like it. And even if that didn't happen, well, I have lived through several economic meltdowns so far and I knew that depending on the human system for my survival is unwise.

However this land had a hitch hiding up its sleeve that I didn't know about, and that is it's soil. It's beautiful soil in one sense, thick and black. For digging though it's like digging military-grade glue. It sticks to everything, it's thick and dense, it is extremely hard to dig. So while I originally intended to do a double-dug garden bed, those plans have gone to hell. I am now going with basically some mongrelized version of a Ruth Stout - Back To Eden garden. First laying down thick paper or cardboard, to block weeds, then piling on a ton of organic matter, then mulching with wood chips. Then next year I pile on more organic matter and more wood chips, and so on. Basically building the soil upwards.

At every stage of this process, the difficulties seemed insurmountable. First, I thought I was NEVER going to get through the process of probating my mother's will, that took 2 years by itself. Then I thought I was NEVER going to find land that I could afford and which met my needs. Then I thought I was NEVER going to be finished with the moving.

And it's still that way now in a sense, I have so many things that need to be done it's crazy. The difference is that I am here now, I have laid hold on the dream. Now I have to make the dream work.

Sold!

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is GOOD.

I just now wired the $54k to close on the house and 3 acres in Northeastern Texas. The land was in some ways better than I could have hoped, but is going to need work. The soil drains poorly, which won't be that much of an issue because I was going to go for heavily amended raised beds anyway, but in the Spring I bet I am going to need galoshes. Mud.

The house fortunately appears to have an intact roof, I might get a metal roof later on. It's going to need a lot of modification for an off-grid lifestyle. What I am going to do is super-insulate one room, my bedroom/power room, so that the tiniest window AC I can get will sufficiently cool it in summer. Because summers in this part of the world are not a thing you want to face without help. I am going to set up solar panels on an adjustable framework (raised and lowered depending on winter or summer) and have the power cords snake in through my bedroom window and into power centers, basically a combination of battery, inverter and power ports. I'm going to make those adaptations and then move all my stuff over there. Then I get all the utilities to Wildhaven shut down, put it on the market, and then move over to the farm full-time. There's a lot of stuff I won't be doing until I do that, because I don't want to spend a lot of my remaining money until the money from selling Wildhaven comes in. The one utility hook-up I want is water, I might have to get a plumber to set me up a separate faucet early on so that I don't have to turn on water to the whole house (whose pipes are in who-knows-what condition) in order to get water. I'll probably do that pretty early on because of course I will need water.

Then, raised beds, lots of them. I have a plan for how to do them cheaply but I have no idea how that works out in practice until I do them. For that matter, I don't know how exactly I will build the adjustable platform for the solar panels until I actually start building. Once I get the raised beds in, I am not sure how late in the growing season that's gonna be but I hope to at least get summer vegetables in, I'm gonna make a PVC greenhouse for an early start to next year.

So I have a lot of work to do, but I'm on my way.

Plan A Wins Out (hopefully)

View from the road

Somewhat run-down little house

Beginnings of a future duck coop near the pond?

Rather run-down kitchen

House from the side and rear

The place in Arkansas fell through, and I am kind of glad now that it did. It had a quit claim deed, and that violated the terms of the buyers agreement so I got to back out of it and it did not cost me anything (except expenses for a trip to Arkansas.)

This property I jokingly call Swamphaven, I got out there not long after a rain and it was crawdad country. The soil is heavy black gumbo that repels the rain, it has two ponds on it (one well-built, the other appearing a little improvised.) The house I would call barely habitable (though considering the state of Wildhaven I probably shouldn't throw stones.) It is nearly a perfect size for me, but rather run down. Thankfully the roof seems to work, there's no internal water damage, though I might throw a steel roof on at some point. It probably needs a proper livestock-proof fence around the property. The property is 3 acres which should be about right for me.

I was going to build raised beds anyway, but on this property they would truly be needed as the land appears to have been bottomlands in relatively recent geological time. Heavy, black soil, full of nutrients I am sure but it needs to get some air and drainage into it before it will grow vegetables. The big pond is clean and full of minnows, the small seemingly improvised pond more muddy and was probably intended just for drainage which is what I will use it for too. Apparently the neighbor's livestock has been grazing it, which has kept the land cleared and the weeds down, but I will need to fence it off. No garden plants for you, cowies.

I signed the agreement for it today, closes in 30 days if all is well. I can't wait to get back out there, the air smells so lovely. Full of green things. It's 20 miles from Paris, Texas which is a good-enough sized town that I can get everything I would need there, but it is also in an utterly secluded area. There is one house on acreage next to this one, and then only fields and pasture on a gravel road to nowhere. I don't think they'll have subdivisions there anytime soon. ;)

Assuming everything goes ahead, I am going to burst into a flurry of activity. I have stuff to move, nonessentials first and then once I get everything lined up I will move out there altogether. I have to get a proper cell phone with unlimited data plan and a wireless hotspot so I can connect out there. I need a proper laptop. I'll need a power system and to build a variable-angle platform to mount solar panels on, plus the interior batteries/power station. I am going to massively insulate one room of the house, the bedroom/power room, so I can run a window AC in there and keep it cool in summer without completely destroying my battery charge. Once the brothers get what they want out of the house and it gets sold, I have literally a year's worth of work to do on the property. I need to get seeds, LOTS of seeds, in the hopes I might actually get a crop in this year. That's honestly going to be touch and go.

There's actually more to be done than I have space or energy to write about. But it is exciting. :)

The overall goal: get as self-sufficient and independent of global food/energy grids as I can. Grow my own food, produce my own power, possibly obtain my own water (though there is co-op water available supposedly.)