Once people began arriving out on the land things began to pick up and time for blog writing quickly vanished. Liz got here about 2 weeks ago, my dad and Charlotte just left after spending a week here and bringing lots of tools and goodies as well as helping out a lot, building a solar oven, mulching, etc. We’ve also met a great couple that lives right in Fulton, Melainia and Justin. They’ve got a composting toilet in their house, keep chickens, and have a garden. They both work at MU and Justin is in plant science and has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of plants.
There have been a number of large developments. First, the driveway has now been graveled. We still need another load which we’ll spot place on the trouble spots and use for some other projects as well as using it for the rubble trench foundation of the straw bale building. No more stuck cars! I just wish the gravel came from a dry creek bed instead of a quarry, but beggars can’t be choosers.
The composting toilet is now basically complete. I would still like to add a hand-washing station on the side and I’m going to paint the front white so it matches the vinyl wrapped around it. It seems to be working great, no smell or flies. I’ve emptied the buckets into a simple pallet compost bin near the garden and it doesn’t even resemble… poop. Just some brown sawdust textured material.
Thanks to dad and Daniel the paths are quickly becoming mulched and are now mostly mud free. Although we are going to have to dig some french drains, or ditches filled with gravel to keep them open, around the bigger communal tarps to divert some of the water that runs down and soaks the ground and makes things muddy. We also need to patch some holes in the tarps. There’s still a lot of brush to be mulched, especially for the garden, but we’ll get there.
There are now 3 tent platforms, Daniel moved into the 6-man tent my dad and Charlotte left for us and put his mattress in it. Then there’s another platform that hasn’t been nailed together yet, and needs a tarp, but it’ll be used for visitors who camp out. I also hung up a giant 15’x40’ billboard vinyl that now houses our nice kitchen setup and new screened-in picnic table. I’ve taken to calling our little settlement Tarpopolis as the tarps spread through the forest.
Liz built a chicken tractor and as of today we now have 4 Rhode Island Reds, 3 hens and 1 rooster to help expand the clan. That brings our current population to 7 full-time residents. We also picked up 6 fertilized guinea hen eggs, which we’re going to attempt to have the chickens hatch.
We really want the guineas because they eat a lot of ticks and range far and wide. The problem is that adult guineas tend to leave and return home, normally you want them from babies and train them to come home to a coop at night for a feeding. Another cool thing about them is that they can fly and so you can build an open-top fenced in area where they can fly into and be safe at night.
So we’re going to get the hens to hatch the guinea eggs we’re going to wait for the hens to lay a few of their own eggs and then switch them out with the guinea eggs because they take a week longer to hatch and then a week later we’ll put those eggs back. At least I believe that’s the plan. So, if all goes well, the tick population is in for a massive decline and it couldn’t happen any sooner.
The solar shower is the next big thing on the list, and I’ll be heading out to get some pieces I need and working on that tomorrow. Clothes washing was another big thing that we didn’t have answer for until Melainia and Justin offered to let us use their little hand crank “Wonder Wash” machine that does a small load by turning a crank. We haven’t tried it yet, but I think it’s a good temporary solution.
After the shower gets done we’ll be getting the garden going. It seems like a million little jobs creep up on you and makes getting the main projects completed take a lot longer. It’s all good as long as we can get started on the actual straw bale structure soon, hopefully in the next week we’ll be breaking ground.
So that’s it from here. If anyone wants to come out we’re giving tours every Saturday at 2pm and we had our first meetup group meeting today which had a total of 6 people at it. I think she’s planning on having the next meeting on May 23, but I’m not sure on that.
