Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 1045)
Hello Everyone!
Late day napping weather, Shifting routines, My focus is getting better & A successful shade grown black locust!
Alright, I better get to pecking out some words here because the sun set some time back and the evening is going by rather quickly. It started raining just as the sun was disappearing over the horizon and the longer that it goes on the more I am lulled by it towards sleepiness.
Having just woken up from a very long nap a few hours ago I should be 'good to go' to at least get this entry made... but between the scent of fresh rain and the pitter-patter sounds it is making on the roof... I am assuredly feeling like it is good napping weather!
I best not focus too much on that or I will dick around here all evening and not get much done... much like I did the last few nights. My brain is still a bit stuck on some coding projects... so at some point I need to focus on them and get it out of my system. Unfortunately, lately that sensation to 'focus' often happens when I am doing the daily writing.
Most likely that has to do with having a text editor open and having to engage the more logical sides of my mind in an effort to spell out my thoughts... but who knows. It could also simply be that when I am in 'writing mode' my mind is a good bit more open to things (especially 'outside the box' things) than other times during the day. I am unsure if I 'do my best thinking' whilst writing but I might actually draw my best 'conclusions' during it.
Anyways, the day was not particularly exciting or anything and although I did manage to get some routine chores done around the shelter site... I once again slacked on going hiking. Mayhaps going forward I should either write first thing in the morning or immediately go hiking... once I get enough espresso in me to clear out the proverbial mental fog.
What keeps tripping me up each day is that I have an incredibly split focus at the moment and while part of me wants to go do mindless (and mindful) labor... I also want to keep looking into ways to solve some technological challenges and possibly cement myself into a course that will see them actualized. The same could be said for getting all my finances in order to purchase this property... because all of those things are incredibly interconnected.
The thing is though that the 'split attention' of it all is rather annoying and keeps leading to incremental progress in one regard or another which is not quite enough with some of it! Not that I am complaining about having such interesting topics to focus on... because it sure as heck beats stressing over housing insecurity... but I think that I need to overhaul my routines and shift away from the ones that keep bogging me down.
To be fair to myself I gotta say that by 'bogging me down' I simply mean that some of my routines that got me this far... will not necessarily be the routines that will best serve me in the future... let alone the present! As I mentioned earlier I think that a small adjustment like either doing the writing or hiking immediately after waking... may well be the kind of subtle shift that I currently need given that it would not massively disrupt any of my other routines.
On an entirely different note, some time back I planted some black locust seeds in one of those large flower pots and drug it over to the chicken coop... and then put some fencing wire inside the inner rim of the pot to keep the chickens out of it. I really did not have a whole lot of hope that the black locust would do well in that location given it is mostly shaded... but whoa there is now a nearly meter tall sapling growing from the pot's often 'too damp' soil.
The really cool thing about it in my opinion is that unlike my other saplings it is truly shade grown which although slower... produces a much denser wood. Another 'cool thing' that I noticed is that the leaves of that sapling are much darker than the saplings that grow in the sunny area of the dog yard. I will have to get some pictures of both as a comparison but for now take my word for it that they are vastly different shades of green.
I have previously discussed focusing on growing foliage for livestock with the black locust... and discussed growing it for timber... and also the variation in density between the shade (forest) grown and field grown wood densities... but how all that relates to each other... and my current experiments... I have probably not been super clear about.
Essentially I have just been trying to get a dozen (or more) healthy saplings so that I can start to see what kind of genetics I am dealing with. By that I mean whether they are super thorny, grow straight versus growing 'twisted', do they branch too often from the trunk, do they grow well in the shade, are they drought tolerant, are they bug and disease tolerant and so forth and so on.
Once I have those kinds of things figured out about the saplings that I have... I can begin the process of selecting the best features for the best usage (ie timber, foliage, shade tolerant, not shade tolerant etcetera) and clone those saplings (for the traits I want) by reproducing them from root cuttings. As a side note I have been considering building a large wooden box with a side door to grow a 'mother' tree in... to make the harvesting of root cuttings easier... but have yet to let myself get that ambitious until I land on a good strain.
Okay, that is about all the words that I have in me for the day and am going to call this entry good enough. I once again failed to get new pictures but am going to rummage through some older ones and see what I can come up with. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
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In no distance time, you'll fix all the technological challenges and gathering of finances.
We have some areca palms that are in more shade than the others, their foilage is a lot darker green and they grow faster than the others.
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