Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 510)
Hello Everyone!
An off day or a day off, Missing the gaming habit, Soil churning chickens, Worm thoughts & A late cold snap!
The sun is just now setting and I guess that I should get to work on this entry before the evening gets much later. Having awoken from a nap not all that long ago I am at least not feeling fatigued or anything which always makes this portion of my day much easier. I also took the entire day off so I actually have nothing to be fatigued about in the first place aside from my usual feeling of being worn around the edges with no apparent reason for it.
I actually woke up rather early today but soon realized that I wanted (okay maybe needed) to take a break from not just writing as soon as I wake up but also from pretty much everything else as well. It is not exactly that the 'repetition' of my days was getting to me (because I enjoy said repetition) but my 'days off' tend to never really be a true day off given that I still write during them and of course have my routine chores to do.
Basically, it is not like doing the writing each day (or any other work) bothers me or anything but at this point on those 'days off' I do not do much besides nap and take the occasional hike. Mainly though I zone out on the computer watching and reading stuff that will hopefully be entertaining or informational but seldom really is.
What I am getting at is that as far as recreational habits go and taking days off in general... I have to make some kind of change because it is getting rather dull and yeah the most exciting thing to occur is if I have an interesting dream while napping! Not that I mind having a nice quiet life with minimal excitement, stress or drams but I really do need a hobby.
I knew that I would run into this sort of problem when I stopped gaming but I have yet to find anything to fill that particular void in my life. The whole 'social' aspect of it has been what has been really nagging at me because now my social interactions are limited to mostly work related stuff which yeah is about as fun as it sounds! There is no easy fix with finding a hobby or having a social life un-hooked from work but I still keep mulling it all over trying to find solutions.
So, far my big 'solution' has been to backslide and start gaming again but mainly just for the upcoming first online ladder season not because I exactly 'want' to... but because before I stopped playing the game I had told some folks that I would help them with the first ladder season. Maybe it is just a convenient excuse to backslide but I do feel inclined to stick to my word and of course have some fun with some old and new friends.
I have a few weeks to figure out if I am going to do it or not so who knows how all of that turns out. If I do backslide though I am thinking that it should come at some kind of cost and maybe that cost should be in the form of sacrificing another habit like watching mindless videos online or eating sugary things. I am still mulling it all over so who knows what will occur there!
On a different note. In my last entry I mentioned how I had churned over a portion of the soil in the 'topsoil trap' near the chicken coop and how I might start doing that every day so the chickens can get the worms... well I think that I only need to do it perhaps two or three times a week instead. I am going to keep an eye on it but today the chickens churned over all that lose soil by themselves and I did not have to do it for them.
I guess that once I broke all the soil up so that it was not one 'solid mass' that they have enough strength in their little legs to keep churning it on their own afterwards. I will still probably need to do it after it rains and especially so during heavy rains when more soil gets deposited there but overall that sure beats having to do it every single day.
Anyway, today was both windy and quite chilly and tonight the temperature will plummet down near freezing but thankfully we will not be getting a late freeze. There is a frost advisory but only for the wee hours of the morning so I doubt that it will have time to do much damage before the sun is out again. At least I hope that is how it works out because I did not cover any of my plants!
The day was all around the perfect 'sleeping weather' and I am sure that tonight will be the same. Before it got dark outside I preheated the cabin with the electric heater and then turned it off and so far things have been staying warm inside which is nice because having the heater on does tend to make the air a bit too dry for my liking. I may have to turn it on again in the middle of the night once I have let the dogs in and out several times but so far it is quite cozy!
Thankfully the weather is going to clear up over the next few days and I will be able to get back to planting more black locust trees. Since I am getting rather low on flower pots I am considering making more raised beds (or even flower boxes) to plant them in but have yet to commit to a course of action one way or another.
All I know is that I have a lot of seeds, plenty of soil and a rather large desire to plant as many of them as I possibly can. Traditionally I have not had much luck starting seeds outside of pots but maybe if I keep the beds (or boxes) rather small and make sure that they drain well that they will do better this time around.
My other concern is that the soil from the 'topsoil trap' may be a bit too 'hot' with all that chicken and dog poop in it. That stuff is probably super potent and I should really be just cutting a small amount of it into an entire bag of regular potting soil.
I should also probably learn more about soil in general and testing it (especially the PH) given that I am making so much of it but I have yet to ascend to that level of 'farming foo' even though I know that it would help me tremendously. Mainly I feel like it would just become another rabbit warren of information that I would get lost in and given my lack of aptitude with gardening... I have yet to justify it to myself as worthwhile.
Maybe once I get the worm and dirt farming really going at full volume I will devote some more time to all that but for now I just stick with what I know and do not deviate from that. After all the worms are thriving, I have one mound of compost halfway ready for food stuff use or currently ready for fruit trees, a functional topsoil trap and eight critters pumping out the poop each day to feed the worms.
What will probably occur is that once I start the worm boxes I will need to monitor the soil temperature and PH closely so that I can maximize both their health and their overall productivity. In other words I think that once I do more container-style worm farming that those things will become much more important to stave off problems that might occur by the worms being in a semi-artificial environment.
Anyway, as with most things there are assuredly going to be stuff to figure out along the way with the worm farming project but overall it seems like they are pretty good at just eating whatever they are fed and making castings without too much required on my part. Which is good because I assuredly do not want to devote huge swathes of my time to playing in the dirt!
Okay, it is getting late here and I am going to call this entry good enough and zone out for the rest of the evening until I drift off to sleep. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
Chicken and dog poop are much too high in nitrogen and need to go in the compost heap in small amounts to rot long and well before they do your soil any good. The best thing for the worms is plant matter, they aren't going to appreciate the animal faeces
Thanks!
Just to be clear those compost mounds only deal with dog waste and the worms are a bi-product. Those mounds are left to sit for around three years and I plant potatoes and other stuff on/in them for the worms. I also add cut vegetation to them like grass clippings.
The dirt to dog waste ratio is rather high (like five to one) and I also use about a shovel of biochar per six other shovels of material. So far it is a pretty solid method I developed off the Chinese clay mound method. It works well but hey I am always learning!
The soil that I have been using from the 'topsoil trap' does not have much dog or chicken waste in it directly and mainly gets it via the water that flows across the dog yard and under/around the chicken coop. Even then the water is rather fast moving so not all of it gets absorbed into the soil caught by the trap.
That soil is the stuff that I have been planting trees with and am wondering if its too 'hot' or not. It is pretty well drained and I have been aerating it rather well by churning it and using the soil lower down so hopefully it is okay.
Sounds ok, so long as your Nitrogen has been converted to Nitrates and aeration is key and you are doing that. In water, it takes about 3 weeks for a functional ammonia conversion cycle to develop but as long as it isn't too concentrated, you're good
🤠