WHAT

Food for the dragon.

So I was swiping through my phone, hunting for the "perfect" blog image.   I needed something that would make our lives look sane interesting and get you totally hooked.  Something that would explain what the hell we're doing, living in an 80 year-old house in the woods that we bought, sight-unseen, over the internet.

Nailed it, amirite?  No?  Maybe that picture isn't worth a thousand words to you, so let me break it down:  You're looking at fire, water, food, money, problems, and garbage.  Okay, so a pile of wood isn't the perfect hook, but if it works then it fits in with everything else around here.

That's about two cords of wood, and it heated our house for one winter.  We bought it after we used up what was here when we moved in.  We didn't know how much we needed, because we're noobs.

Winter is bullshit.

Confession time: The winters here are pure bullshit.  I hate being cold, and the only thing I love about snow is that it melts.  What we learned in 2018 is that two cords is enough to keep us alive through the winter, but not enough to keep us comfortable, even with a propane backup heater.

Three cords would have been a lot better for this drafty-ass house and ancient wood stove. Basically, our schedule revolves around "feeding the dragon" every few hours for about seven months out of the year, if we want to avoid freezing to death.

The last few months of that winter were cold ones at the Spinney.  Okay, lesson learned.  Now we buy four cords of wood each Spring.  Firewood and propane are both crazy expensive though.  We might as well just burn a pile of cash to keep warm, since we're paying the mortgage on a fucking forest.

If we had the tools and the infrastructure, we could be harvesting firewood ourselves.  That's something we'll get to eventually, along with sorting out a more efficient wood stove and building a house with some grown-up insulation.

All that snow has to go somewhere.

The big red pipe in that first picture is the top end of our water well.  There's an electric pump way down the pipe that pushes water up and into the house.  It's not a very productive well, so we have to be picky about what we use water for, and when, even though we're surrounded by the stuff.

One (shockingly obvious) downside to an electric well pump is that when the power goes out the water stops flowing.  Power cuts are not exactly rare out here on the delicate fringes of the US grid, so we keep water in storage and cook on the wood stove when we have to.  Ramen FTW.

Figuring out a better water supply and reducing our reliance on electricity are goals we'll definitely be chasing. In the short term, we'll be working on diverting rainwater for a garden, and re-using some of our water.

We had the munchies that day.

That apple tree behind the woodpile is one of many that we've found scattered around the place. Some of them are in pretty good shape, and some of them are well on their way to becoming mulch.

They're mixed in with a lot of other trees and plants that we're starting to identify and make use of.  The wild blueberries and blackberries are definitely popping out here.  Some years we manage to get out and pick stuff before the wildlife gets to it, but it hasn't been a serious priority for us yet.

Foraging and gardening will start taking up more of our time once we get a grip on what plants can thrive here, and which wild foods are available to harvest throughout the year.

Bruh, we were so proud.

Back to that first picture.  Left rear, the big green thing?  That's a cedar tree.  In fact, it's the same big green thing you'll find on the right side of this picture.  Cedar is useful for making stuff that can be traded for money, or so I'm told.

There are several other trees in the forest (another shocking revelation) that are pretty good for making stuff, so we're slowly gathering tools and learning how to use them.  We made that little wood shed between the cedar and the noodle-shack (more on that in a bit).

Anyway, if you're an engineer or a maker, one close look at that POS will probably tell you exactly how things played out.

Me, shedless.

Making things badly seems to be pretty easy so far.  Just think, we made a super bad wood shed, and that only took a couple of weeks.  Eventually it fell over and scared the shit out of us in the middle of the night because it had about three feet of snow on top of it.

We didn't understand how heavy snow can be, and we didn't build it right.  Noobs, remember?  I spent the rest of the winter crawling under the wreckage twice a day, wondering if "HE DID IT FOR THE WOOD" was going to fit on my tombstone.

So...we'll cut down some more trees and make another one.  Hopefully, making things properly is still easy with some experience. I don't really want to build this fucker a third time.

Since we're sort of failing our way through this homesteading thing, learning how to harvest wood in a genuinely sustainable way is something we'll have to work on, or we'll just end up with a bunch of broken stuff and no trees.

Before the coming of the Noodle.

That brings us to garbage.  The big white lump in the first picture (also the big orange lump in this picture) is a sheet of vinyl that used to be part of a roadside billboard.  We found it laying in the yard when we moved in. 

In 2018, our tool shed started leaking after a bunch of shitty old shingles blew off in a storm.   We dragged that sheet of vinyl up there and nailed it down to keep the tools dry "temporarily".

Up side, it's working out better than the wood shed did. Down side, it's mid-2020 and our roof still has a huge cheesy spiral noodle printed on it.  So now it's "upcycled" trash, but it's still trash.  Probably not sexy enough to get any traction on Pinterest.   But, hey, you can see our noodle from space.  That episode illustrates a couple of our problems.

What the hell is wrong with people?

First, like most of you, we're not exactly swimming in cash. Fixing things "the right way" is usually more of a dream than a reality, so we do what we can with what we've got. When we've got more we do more.

Second, the people who have lived on this land since the house was built in 1940 were apparently just mindless fucking SLOBS.  There's garbage everywhere.  Most of it can be dragged out of the woods, sorted, and recycled, but it's going to be a huge amount of work.

Eventually we'll build a forge and start melting down glass and scrap metal for re-use. Those definitely aren't short term projects, and we'll basically be learning as we go.  Again, we're noobs.

Can-kickers need not apply.

So, there's the WHAT.  Instead of kicking the can down the road, we've decided to stop and pick it up.  Every day we're working on reducing the damage that our lifestyles do to the world around us, by shifting our behavior out of the American mainstream of desperate, endless consumption and disposal.

Our goal is to unfuck this one little patch of North America as much as we possibly can before we die, and leave it better than we found it.  To do that, we have to behave like stewards of the land, instead of following the example of generations of temporary squatters that came before us.  There's a massive amount of work to be done here.  We're not properly equipped for the future yet, and we have a lot to learn, but I have to believe we can get there from here.