Confused? Think “squirrel” That’s my Peak Oil brain. Crashing down to 1884 on the left, and doing battle with the 21st century on the right. I feel insane – like there is something wrong with me for going to the trouble of cobbing up a rocket stove and gathering sticks and branches to burn when it comes time to put up blackberries and green beans. I mean, go to a random “homesteader” (yuppiepieceoshitmsgreenthmb) site or bookstand best seller and you got somebody with a fancy recipe calling for industrial made ingredients – and they’re cooking down their hybrid bounty on a gas stove with the a/c running keeping the kitchen nice and cool. I, on the other hand, am swatting bugs, filthy and sweaty needing only some hair mats to audition as an extra on “Quest for Fire”.
I’m in a state of gridlock. Too many things in opposite directions needing attention all at the same time. For example, it’s weed time in the garden, but I have this funny problem just pulling weeds without planting that area in something, or laying mulch down around what I weed. And the rain won’t stop so’s I can’t get any grass clippings and the ready to spread compost piles are a soggy mass. Not too pleasant to work with. Rain caused the horse manure in the pickup to start composting on its own – and I gotta get some green stuff to mix with it in a new compost heap, but all the wire pens are full so it’s time to find some chicken wire that isn’t too mangled. Then take the scythe out to the pasture and slice and rake up the noxious perrilla mint weeds chocking the place out. Right after I pick the potato bugs off the tater plants since rain is coming tonight and I don’t want to waste a buck’s worth of spinocet washing off before it will do any good. And I’m supposed to be cooking dinner and tomorrow is the regularly scheduled trip to town…
I just blame it all on the fucking rain. Every two or three days for two months now we’ve gotten a ground pounder that sogs everything and beats to shit any seedlings I put out. Truth is I got too many irons in the fire. I gotta do everything…now! Civilization could stop dead in it’s tracks tomorrow for all I know. And stupid stuff like letting the sourdough starter go belly up is a major crisis – I got too busy on a fencing project and left it above the stove on a day of heavy oven usage. Just trying to fix a weak line where the goats were getting out and hitting the new fruit trees. And somehow butchering the pig got put off during the cool season so I suppose the next time the wife melts in these hot mugy days I’ll kill his ass, gut him outside and then drag it into the kitchen to skin and grind up into sausage. Haven’t gotten around to rigging up a smoke house yet…
Everything around here is half assed done. Some days I feel like I’m halfway there, and other times I wonder if there is any leisure on the horizon when and if things start coming together. Right about the time I finally got all things chicken down to a fine art the price of corn chops goes through the damn roof and folks are going to balk at the price I gotta ask for eggs since all their cash is sluicing into the gas tank. Too many sellers and not enough buyers at the sale barn so getting rid of all these chicks in various stages of growth is going to be tricky. But I did get another milk goat cheap, and two wiener pigs for a song last Saturday. Now I gotta figure out how to castrate the male – here I am in the sticks and don’t know anyone to ask for help. Everyone just buys their pork at the walmart. I suppose I’ll google w dot cut a pig dot com or some shit just like I’ve had to do with every other component of this farmin bazzoo clusterfuck. Grampa drove a creamery truck and dad was a CPA. I know how to back up a trailer and learned to cook the books on my paper route as a kid, but nobody taught me shit about scratching around in the dirt. Oh, huh huh… I said “scratch”. The boy was playing with the neighbor kid and now I know why they all have shaved heads… Hope we doused the boy and us with dog shampoo fast enough to ward off a headlice outbreak or I can add a dozen loads of laundry to the list. Which may or may not exceed the well’s capacity…
Great Grandma said “it’s a good life if you don’t weaken”. Tough old bird she was.
Comrade, I’m with ya. I’ve been feeling the same lately. Too damn much to do, too much left half done. Too much not even effing started yet. Somehow it feels good to know that maybe it’s not all about my own personal ineptitude.
And it makes me wonder. I do all this because I want to. I *can* throw the clothes in the dryer and crank up the AC to do my canning. If I need a total break, I can say screw it and go blow 30 bucks on a movie with popcorn in a theater so cold I need a jacket and long pants. But what about when we HAVE to? With no breaks. I guess you just suck up and do. Which isn’t really so bad, but still, I admire more and more those who came before, who forgot more than I’ll ever know.
Yeah, I got to thinking about the screw it factor… and realized that’s the source of my turmoil. I thought “engaged in battle with the 21st century” summed it up so well that I’m using it as my tag line now.
Nice to see a latocer over here. Good posts from you over there.
Oh, man, was I glad to read that. It has been utter disaster here, with multiple crop failures, animal deaths, house problems, health problems (from a weird place, not lifestyle-related). I am so far out of my depth with what is coming I think I REALLY understand a quote that I read lately in a article about people who survived disasters: (something like) people who prepare are the kind of people that can see themselves surviving. Those that don’t seem to give up and expect to die, or freeze. I can feel myself “freezing” in frustration and horror of what is coming and how little I really know about what I am doing. I find myself looking around at the grocery store, thinking “yep, I’ll miss THAT.” I try most days not to do that, but it happens.
How to castrate a pig.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2111659_properly-castrate-baby-pig.html
Dad & us kids would do the deed on weanling pigs by each kid holding a pig by a front & a back leg in each hand. Kind of x shaped & presenting the back end, belly up to dad. It helped to use a feed trough to place the back of the pig in with his rear end up against one end.
Dad would then proceed with the operation as described above.
It was important to pull or scrap the cords instead of cutting them.
If we ruptured one we called for Mom who came with needle & thread & sowed them up.
One time we Had maybe 50 to do & the nuts were flying fast & the dog was catching them in the air. By the time we were done, He just lay their with a pile of nuts around him.
Sharon had a nice entry a few days back that related to the balance between enough land and our ability to manage it without enormous amounts of equipment and petroleum:
http://sharonastyk.com/2008/06/24/how-much-land-do-you-need/
I’m am very small-scale as I am still a slave to the man and his feudal game, but I hope to keep increasing things as time goes on until I’ve got the balance about right before I retire. I figure if I can work it while maintaining my full-time servitude, I can likely do it when I have all day. I think it will work. I’m still in good shape and will be in even better shape if I decide to stop drinking beer.
Still, while the rain has maimed our brothers and sisters out in the belly of the nation, it has done wonders for me. I’ve already got broccoli flowers and I’ve hardly done a damned thing.
Next year, more stuff growing in plastic buckets. At least I can bring them in out of the rain if I have to do so.
Wishing for blue skies over your homestead, comrade.
Hi Larry, thanks for stopping by and posting.
So me and a fellow doomer grabbed the pig and flipped it on his back, then my friend sat on him and we saw there were no nuts… then saw the cut scar. Well, when you got a pig on his back and the razor is out I suppose you could call the deed done. Used the opportunity to clip the nose rings out of his snout – a pig that can’t root is not going to have a very good time. Especially when he takes a bullet 6 short months from now.
@ Frank – Sharon’s got a pretty good site, and her line about “buy as much as you can afford” I think got watered down too much. The only thing better than a quarter section is a full section. Two or three acre “homesteads” are just big back yards, and we all know whats gonna go down in suburbia. We had live water as the first order of business. Settled on 50 acres with small year round spring. We were leaning for a 12 acre spot with live water over a one hundred acre spread that was dry, and cheaper, too. Took another month of holding out for a bigger and better place. That episode of self control paid off well.
An acre, a term we still use today, is actually an Olde English measure of the amount of land a typical medieval family could farm without beasts of burden.
As recently as 1900, the amount of land being actively farmed by typical single-family (as opposed to commercial farm, a farm run as a business for the purpose of producing marketable agricultural products, such as wheat or cotton, often run by multiple related families and/or tenant farmers/hired help) was a meager 13 acres, and that was with partial mechanization and animal labor.
As your more recent posts indicate, working a farm is frickin’ hard work, and there is always something still needing tending to.
In short, I think Sharon is right in her assessment.
An acre was also the amount of field/pasture a man can mow with a scythe by noon… Real rough measurement – some “acres” were anywhere from 1.25 to 2 1/2 times the modern 208×208 ft (ish)…
If I was just left alone to work a piece of ground with nothing more than a pick, shovel, and hoe I have no doubt that I could bust up and maintain three standard acres over the course of a year. But that’s with the wife ringing the bell for dinner breaks and the kid old enough to tend all the critters. Plug in new ideas like no till planting in wheat/ cover crop stubble, double and triple cropping via companion planting etc and that much ground isn’t even necessary. Except for the cash crop to pay the cable bill, y’know.