I've been clearing land all day and bought 50lbs of buckwheat. I intend to try sowing/harvesting by hand. I will use this mostly for breads and pastries. This is something of an experiment.
Building skills, I'm almost finished a chicken coop. I made a dry stone arch bridge but it failed because the frame sank, I will try again. I am learning carving to make wooden animal toys for my child, who will be born in July (I have made a bear and a fox, soon an elephant, but they still need to be sanded). I would like to learn timber framing and make a small cabin on the land but it may be too expensive, now.
I'm trying to make an animated village for my site background with HTML Canvas, and originally I was making it procedurally, but its too ugly, so I will have to learn some digital illustration until it's beautiful.
If you have any pictures available (especially of this bridge) I'd be curious to see.
Are you tilling? Doing raised beds? We're planting a bit this year and dealing with weeds, etc. has been a hassle (also, most of the no-dig crowd seem to basically advocate using many tons of compost, which is great but not something you can assume a steady supply of)
With house compost and composted manure from a local farmer. The lower garden is mostly no till with added compost. We're not really sure what we're doing! So I can't really give advice.
I usually document what I'm working on on Twitter as a micro blog
I grew up in Nashua, and when I looked at your posts about restoring your home it made me nostalgic for New Hampshire. I live in Alaska now and hope to spend the rest of my life here, but NH has the feeling of home that you can only get from having a childhood there. I found your posts a while back, and I always enjoy looking at what you've been up to when I haven't seen it for a while.
I used to run and bike past so many houses that look like this, and some part of me always wanted to do what you're doing. So thank you for sharing your journey!
Here's how I tell people how my experience of Nashua has changed: "When I was young, we used to tell people how to get to our house by saying at one point, 'Turn right where the cows are. You'll go over an old stone bridge and then through some narrow curves on a few hills. Then turn right at..."
Then it turned into "Turn right where the cows used to be."
Then it became "Turn right at the ____ subdivision."
When I was young I did a lot of bicycling and running. In early high school (1980s) a friend and I used to ride our bikes as far as we could in the morning, and then try to find our way back without asking for directions. We found all kinds of old back roads and small cemeteries and old stone walls and other remnants of old New England. Now when I go back and go for a run or a drive it's endless subdivisions. I don't resent that at all, I know things grow and change. But it's certainly part of why I don't miss Nashua much except for nostalgia.
That's funny. I was born in 1988, so that world was gone by the time I got here. And even then, when I was a kid there were abandoned buildings to explore like the old tannery, and those are demolished now.
For all the changes they can't get the downtown to "work" and they are really, really bad at trying. I tried too: the mayor appointed me to the downtown improvement committee where I got to watch nothing happen first hand.
I'm sorry to hear that. From a distance, it seemed like there was some interesting revitalization work going on in the downtown area. I remember going to a barbershop off Main Street as a kid with my dad every couple of weeks. Back then it was a classic old downtown, with shoe stores and shirt stores and barbershops and hardware stores and all that.
Out of curiosity
How’s life in Alaska. It has always been a dream for me to move to Alaska since its a beautiful state and last thing what about the jobs there
I love Alaska. I live in Sitka, which is a small town on the side of an island. We have about 10k people, but our town is a 14-mile by 1/2 mile strip of land on a 100-mile long island that's almost entirely wilderness. I like that we're a big enough town to have a thriving community - good educational opportunities, a variety of work available, an impressive arts community. But you can walk into the woods anywhere at the edge of town and immediately find yourself in actual wilderness. Subsistence is also a way of life for most people - almost everyone has a freezer with fish and wild game that they caught themselves.
The virus is going to have a serious impact here, like so many places. So many people depend on the summer tourism season to make a living. There are charter fishing operations, tour operations, retail operations. Those people and businesses will make almost nothing this year. And when this is over, how long will it take people to be able to afford summer travel again?
It looks like you may have the same cart that I do. Hint: in case the bearings fail, go-kart bearings are an excellent and higher-quality replacement and they're the same size. I load mine with 200+ lbs of hay at a time and haven't seen any problems since.
When you get around to milling the buckwheat, see if you can get some coarse ground flour from both the kernel and husk. With it you can make inaka (country style) soba, which is really quite special. Buckwheat makgeoli is also easy and tasty.
You might be interested in this chap's work. He came to prominence after his construction of a home was covered on a TV programme here in the UK. The link here is about that house - and the TV programme is well worth watching, too - and the rest of the site is about eco-building etc.
Building skills, I'm almost finished a chicken coop. I made a dry stone arch bridge but it failed because the frame sank, I will try again. I am learning carving to make wooden animal toys for my child, who will be born in July (I have made a bear and a fox, soon an elephant, but they still need to be sanded). I would like to learn timber framing and make a small cabin on the land but it may be too expensive, now.
I'm trying to make an animated village for my site background with HTML Canvas, and originally I was making it procedurally, but its too ugly, so I will have to learn some digital illustration until it's beautiful.