Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 579-584)

Hello Everyone!

A long overdue entry, The heatwave rolls on, Thoughts on water storage & Black Locust as fodder!

I never wrote anything yesterday and have already spent most of the morning looking at lame stuff online instead of writing. So... I best dive in before these days start stacking up and I get even further behind on these entries.

The weather has still been brutally hot as the heatwave continues but yesterday it did drop by a few degrees (down to like ninety-nine Fahrenheit) and with the breeze it did not feel quite so much like the interior of a convection oven. There was also a good bit of cloud cover which surely helped keep things 'cooler' but it has yet to rain again.

Overall the conditions outdoors are once again back to being very dry and looking like they are about to get drier because there is no rain being forecast for the next five or so days. I am just going to have to stay on extra high alert over the coming week and hope that a good rain occurs (sans thunderstorms) to douse everything again before the summer begins.

Switching my routines around to where I am basically taking the hottest months of the year off has been interesting to say the least but I think that it has been the right move given the conditions here. Although I still wind up spending the winter cooped up more often than I want to be due to the weather... for the most part I can actually get in more hours of work on those short cold days than the long hot ones.

It is really the combination of factors here that make that switch (if not necessary then just wiser) because during the hotter months is when the biting pests and snakes are out and all too active! Sure the weather is often stifling hot (even at night) but it really is those other two factors that really concern me the most.

Heck even during this last winter the ticks were pretty bad and although I quit hiking in the woods a few months ago every time that I get even slightly off a road or trail I wind up finding one or more ticks on me later! Basically the best thing that I can do is just avoid getting out in the bush and be extra attentive anytime that I wind up handling brush.

Thankfully the brush work is minimal this time of year aside from the occasional fallen branches that need picked up from the roads, trails or from around the shelter site itself. Doing all that 'brush work' jazz during the colder months sure goes a long way and it is pretty nice being able to avoid needing to do it when the pests are bad!

Okay, another day has passed and I never worked more on this entry let alone finished it. For whatever reason I have been really hit or miss on the writing of late and even though on mornings like this when I awake at four o'clock... I just fail to allocate enough time for doing it.

There of course is no simple reason for my slacking off on that front so suffice it to say that it is a combination of not feeling all that inspired and feeling stressed. Of course not actually having much to write about during my recent downtime plays a part as well... which happens almost every time that I take some time off from lots of physical activity.

In all honesty there is more to it but spelling it out here does not seem like the best use of my time. Lately it seems like all I want to spend my time on is gaming online, playing with the dogs or zoning out watching videos. Heck even most of the videos that I have been watching have been gaming related or comedic fantasy skits that yup are also gaming related.

That facet of my life is such an odd one and although it does not meld well (from a writing perspective) with the other aspects of my lifestyle it is by far the largest contributor to my mental well-being and as stated numerous times... my only real social outlet. I often wonder what my life would have been like sans online gaming and I shudder to think about never finding it!

The peril of course is indulging too much in it all and not balancing it out with plenty of other mental stimuli and lots of (or just enough) physical activity. Since I am assuredly a binge gamer I have to work with that tendency and not against it but I also have to not completely cave to the tendency no matter how much I may want to!

Which is of course 'all easier said than done' but overall I do pretty well at the balancing act. Just doing my routine chores each day tends to be sufficient (as far as physical activity goes) to keep me in shape.

Alright, it is yet another morning here. I never finished this entry yesterday so here I am in the wee hours of the day doing my best to wake up all the way and get this entry a little further towards completion. One way or another I need to wrap it up before it grows overly long and becomes a mess to edit!

Anyway, yesterday was markedly cooler in the early part of the day so I went ahead and hauled the last two remaining large flower pots from the old garden area (near the pine forest) to inside the dog yard. Since both the pots were rather heavy I hauled them with the wagon and all I can say is I am glad that it was a 'downhill' task!

All that I really did was cut down some of the pokeweed in the dog yard, position the pots to get maximum sunlight and then installed a piece of fencing around the pair of them to keep the chickens out. The piece of fencing barely fit around the two pots which worked out good because it is so snug that I did not need to stake it to the ground or secure it by any other means.

One of those two pots is the one that those grains were growing in and the other one has potatoes and black locust growing in it and it is also where I planted the matured grains from the first pot. Maybe now that they will get more sun (and will be easier to water) perhaps they will do better than they were before.

Hopefully the grains that I planted will grow back because I really do want to get more of them growing around here aside from just in those big flower pots. It is fine if it grows in the pots but I would like to experiment with getting it established in the ground also which would be ideal for wildlife and chicken fodder purposes.

As far as those two big pots and that section of fencing goes... I think that they will be the beginning of me finally creating some gardening area inside the dog yard. I am still debating on whether it is worth sacrificing so much 'open yard' to growing plants but at this point it might be well worth it considering it is the one place the deer do not venture into!

I never mentioned it but something also ate all those black locust that I planted inside the PVC garden fence and it was not the deer because the fence keeps them out. Which leads me to believe that it was either rabbits small enough to get through the mesh of the fencing, squirrels or perhaps even rats.

Basically some kind of critter (or critters) really enjoys feasting on the young growth and in the future I will assuredly have to do more to protect them than what I have done. All of which is just part of the learning curve and not something that I find totally discouraging because whoa have I learned a lot!

I think that growing the trees in pots at first will at least save them from the rabbits and as long as I have them in a fenced area (or surround the individual pots with fencing) until they mature... they should do fine! All of which is what I already knew to do but I had totally not counted on the deer growing braver and getting up that close to the dog yard!

Seriously though I do think that the pokeweed is my best deterrent for the deer (minus using fencing) because it both hid the tiny seedlings and is apparently a plant the deer do not even rummage through while looking for other plants to eat. At least that is the case when the pokeweed is small because apparently the deer (and a host of other things from birds, opossums, foxes and black bears to name a few) will eat the matured fruit.

Getting the pokeweed to grow alongside the black locust should not be all that hard because apparently all that soil from the topsoil trap is loaded with seeds from the pokeweed growing in the dog yard. In other words as long as I keep using that soil I should have no problem getting the pokeweed to grow in the pots with the seedlings with zero 'extra effort' involved.

As much as this most recent crop getting wiped out by the deer sucks it also proves my point about the role the tree can play in the forest here as far as wildlife food goes. Of course that is not the only benefit of the tree (and not the purpose of me growing them) but it is an incredibly nice side-effect.

A 'side-effect' that has me thinking more and more on growing lots of small trees specifically for livestock and poultry fodder. I guess that ideally I would want to get the trees about three to four years old and then start routinely coppicing them or 'half-coppicing' them above where the deer browse.

In the past I have always looked more at growing the trees for building material purposes but now it might be way more prudent to focus on the fodder aspect of things which yeah makes for a much smaller goal as far as the resulting 'useful' tree size goes. Like I have said before even if I just grow enough to feed the chickens it would offset their feed cost a good bit and make it well worth the endeavor.

Well, I fell asleep last night before I could get this posted... so here I am just before dawn on what is yet another new day. Even though I keep failing to wrap these posts up (because I keep falling asleep early) at least my sleep schedule is back on track and I have successfully re-instituted my daily napping habit!

Anyway, yesterday was another blistering hot one and I swear it is like standing inside of a convection oven during the hottest parts of the day and even once the sun sets it takes it a rather long time to start cooling down. It has been pretty intense to say the least but so far I have managed to keep myself and all the critters from having a miserable time during the heatwave.

Lately I have been rather hit or miss on getting all my routine chores done each day so I spent a bunch of time catching up on some stuff and after a few hours of activity I had to retreat indoors to cool down. There was even a slight (but steady) breeze but all it seemed to do (even in the shade) was blow the hot and dusty air around.

Now that we have not gotten any more rain things have really dried out around here and I have to admit it makes for some sketchy fire conditions in this kind of woodland with all its slash pines and scrubland vegetation. One thing that it has made me really think about a lot over the last many days is how to collect and store more water on site.

I am mainly talking about making more watering holes, more collection methods from the various structures and even some very crudely constructed ponds just for the high volume. Although I want to keep it simple I will not be using tarps and plastic to do it and am instead considering investing in a bunch of very heavy mil pond liner.

Alright, it is another morning here and I am off to a slow start after waking at a little after four this morning. I swear the first few minutes of my day are almost always spent in a fog of letting the dogs out, brewing espresso and then staring blearily at the computer screen until I either open the text editor... or decide not to.

There is supposed to be a lull in the heatwave today but I have to say that yesterday was absolutely brutally hot and if the other days were like being in a convection oven... yesterday was more akin to being in a blast furnace. I am assuredly more accustomed to heat with high humidity than I am this heat that lacks any humidity at all!

The slight (but steady) breeze is all that has made it bearable outdoors over the last two weeks but yesterday it just felt like it was blowing around super hot air and lacked the sort of 'cooling effect' that I had previously noticed. In other words all the hot air blowing around made it feel even more hot than it already felt.

It also blew a good bit of dust around and given how dry things are there is plenty of the stuff around to get blown about by it. The dust has gotten so bad around the shelter site itself that I have taken to spraying the bare spots with water (during the hottest parts of the day) just to keep the dogs (and me) from kicking up so much of the stuff.

I would not exactly call it a 'hellscape' but the conditions sure are there for it in regards to wildfire. All of it has me thinking to do more fire preparedness and prevention stuff later this year. I swear if I had not done the preparations around here that I had already done before this heatwave hit I would be going frigging crazy with anxiety!

All of which brings me back around to collecting and storing more water on site and of course where to store it so that it is actually useful. Aside from the small pond and watering-hole ideas I have also been mulling over a number of other options like large metal livestock troughs and even above-ground swimming pools.

Basically I am entertaining every option that I can for storing water at the highest point (elevation) on the property which is actually a good bit of the place considering its center is basically an elevated plateau. Although most of the runoff from the 'plateau' winds up in the meadow it really would not be all that hard to catch some of it before it does.

Alternatively, there is always the option of pumping from the meadow but that is unrelated to what I am driving at here. As a side note, if I caught a lot of the water before it got to the meadow... most of it would wind up their anyways because it would be the destination of the overflow water from the uphill storage.

Anyway, without getting into building cisterns or purchasing holding tanks... there just are not a heck of a lot of good options as far as potable water goes but any number of things will assuredly work for non-potable purposes or what I think of as utility water.

Most of the options are not great ones because of how plastic breaks down in the sun's ultra-violet light but I swear those little blue swimming pools hold up incredibly well as long as they are in moderate shade. I have yet to look into options for making them more UV resistant but there is probably a paint or sealer that would work well for it.

Well, it looks like this entry just keeps getting longer because yup it is another morning and I still never got this wrapped up and shared! Perhaps today is the day that I finally do it and quit all this procrastination or whatever it is.

The thing is that I keep intending to get this entry wrapped up but I wind up losing interest early in the day (after writing) and then later in the day I feel too fatigued or simply uninterested to fool around with it. On the bright side though... I have not stayed up late editing and posting which has absolutely helped me stay on track with my sleep cycle so go figure!

Yesterday, was a rather productive day because I was able to work in the garden late in the afternoon when things had cooled down a bit. Mainly I got some extra dirt added to the potato plants, shuffled some of the flower pots into the shade and re-organized some of the other pots so that they get better sun.

Overall my gardening endeavors this year were a pretty big flop but I at least have 'something' growing. Like I have said before if I can use all that stuff (including the potatoes) as seed for the next grow season... that is about the best that I can hope for and will be happy enough with that eventuality.

Although it has never been my intention to be 'self-sufficient' in the food department (for a number of reasons but mainly because it is unrealistic) at this point I am seriously entertaining that very notion. I still have no illusions (delusions) that it is feasible but considering the times ahead I should at the very least give it a go!

Mainly I have been thinking about how to grow food in containers (inside the dog yard) but I have also been mulling over turning the eastern slope of the meadow into a massive terraced garden. Currently there are way too many slash pines along that slope for it to be useful but I am thinking to cut them down this autumn (or winter) and using them for raised beds to start the terracing process.

None of that would be an ideal setup but it would make for good use of the material created by felling the pines. It would also save a lot of work hauling other materials to the area for creating raised beds with.

For now it is still a 'loose idea' but may well be worth endeavoring upon given all the current factors between rising food costs and shrinking availability. Heck, the current scenario is grim enough to motivate me to do more farming so I can only imagine how I will feel about it over the coming months and/or years!

Well, it has now been all too many days (maybe even weeks) since I last added to this entry and I have fallen into the habit of avoiding it altogether instead of diving back in... so here I am once again!

I could assuredly offer many excuses but when it comes down to it I have been spending my online time binge gaming. Aside from these entries suffering I do not have much in the way of regrets in that regard but it is one thing to drop the ball and another thing to fail to pick it back up again.

When that heatwave first hit I more or less got stuck indoors and the longer that it went on (for the better part of two weeks) the harder it became to break out of the habit of spending my time gaming. Which was something that I had begun doing before the arrival of the heatwave only to let myself get sucked back in again once it began.

My time gaming has not been quite so lonely as it once was and having other folks to play with has been pretty awesome so that has been nice to say the least but it also makes it in incredibly difficult to break away from it so go figure!

Okay, there is another entry after this one that I will hopefully be posting soon but for now I just have to get this one shared. My apologies on the long silence and I hope folks understand that taking some extended time away for myself was long overdue.

I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

I have no idea what these mushrooms are but they have been popping up everywhere.

These are those big flower pots that I moved into the dog yard.

I really wish this picture of a large Eastern Kingsnake had come out better. I got this one after it had been eating some of the chicken eggs and began wandering away.

Thanks for reading!

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Cheers! & Hive On!