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.)