Howdy Hubskiers!
I've never done a blog or really had much presence online, but during the pandemic I've found reading your posts on Hubski to be a real help. This community is pretty awesome, especially compared to how negative and unpleasant so much of the internet can be.
So I decided to give back a little. It's not as interesting as what a lot of you seem to do--I'm not a daredevil helicopter pilot saving babies from brushfires while painting one-handed portraits of the royal family--but I wanted to share what I can in the hopes that some of you enjoy it.
Hah! You're very generous, I'll give you that! Granted, maybe in a couple years I'll have a collection of accidents and missteps sufficient to help somebody else out.... hmm... maybe you're on to something.
Have I missed posts about hubskiers saving babies and painting the royal family? Looking forward to checking out your blog. As you’ve no doubt discovered, original content is welcome here!! Onward!
Thanks! I hope you enjoy. Just put this together today for everybody's amusement
Alright. I'm in. Anyone that writes like that has my attention. :-) Coupla questions: 1. The land. How big is your plot, and who owns it? 2. Blogger lets you edit the date of your posts (IIRC), and I'd suggest going ahead and just back-dating the first group, one day after the other. That way they will load in order properly, and give a clear reading order to newcomers. 3. You need an Intro Post. You need to set people up. Fortunately, you got some experience under you, so a "Hi! I'm Bubba, this is my wife Bubbette, and our dogs Bub, Bubby, and Bobo. We decided to live off-grid and never have a job again, and believe this is possible because X." is going to be way easier to write post-hoc than as the first post ever. And you need this because every single person who visits the blog from today on, will need that intro... even if they already knew you. Gotta bring em up to speed, dontchaknow. Looking forward to more details about what you are building, and how! Keep us informed! Now, it's my birthday, so I've decided to steal a B-17 and joyride it across the sky drawing huge penises over our local military bases.... or, "tuesday", as I like to call it. :-)
Thanks for the tips! I'll make an intro, and see about adjusting those dates. The land is 25 acres, so not huge, but plenty for a small homestead, and all ours. The real win is that we're at the end of a long private road, and have at least a mile in any direction between us and the closest other people (in most directions, more than that). Location-wise, we also put a lot of work into picking our spot... we spent years looking for land, and found a plot that's alone, but not isolated. We can get to a gas station in less than ten miles, and can be in a major town in about 30 minutes' drive. You and several others who've asked questions have given me ideas for posts... I should really put up a couple posts about picking a location, our resource management systems, etc. Thanks!
Surprisingly, water and toilets have been two of the easiest things to get used to. Our two-bucket setup for water gives us about 5 gallons of fresh, clean, running water at any given time, and it turns out you can do almost all of your normal day-to-day with 5 gallons at a time. Any time the clean bucket runs low, we just go down to the creek and grab a bucket of dirty water to pour into the filter. Once we have gutters up, we won't even have to do that--we'll just catch the rain in a barrel and feed it through the filter. A lot of people I know in real life comment on how hard it must be to use an outhouse in the winter, but I don't know, there's something about it that's kind of bracing, weirdly. Using the bathroom just hasn't come up as an issue for either of us. Now, the thing that really sapped my wife's morale was not being able to wash her hair. Until we figured that out, it was tough, and about five days into a trip, she was clearly "tolerating" more than "enjoying" the outdoors. For me, it was food variety. It's so easy to go into "camping" mode and think "sausages, eggs, steak" and all those other campfire foods. But when I made caesar salads, or toast, or had brie and butternut squash, that was when my brain clicked over and finally left "camping" behind.
Oh, and I almost forgot to add--one of our earliest lessons was that in a long-term outdoors survival setting, entertainment is just non-optional. Keeping your mind fed is every bit as important as putting sustenance in your body. We very rapidly learned that you have to have books, cards, a radio, musical instruments, a whole variety of things to keep you entertained. When you're at the mercy of the elements and may occasionally have no choice but to sit in the same place for twelve or fourteen hours, you can't consider entertainment a "luxury." That realization really changed our approach, and made being in the woods so much more pleasant.
Consider me super interested. Most of the homes I'm looking at right now don't have enough yard to do much more than grow a nice garden and maybe put some solar panels on the garage. I'm still super interested in permaculture and carbon neutral/ carbon negative living though. Great post man, glad to have you around.
Thanks, I really appreciate how welcoming everybody is! I'll be sure to take some pictures for you of a few other things we're doing. Over the last year, we've planted a couple dozen fruit trees and other perennials to add to our food forest. We already have several native species like hickory, blackberry, mayapple, sumac, and pawpaw that will provide food, and we've added apples, pears, peaches, pecans, cherries, and a few others. While we're too late in the season now, we also have an abundance of chanterelles, and I've spread morel spores around to try and encourage some morels to pop up. I'm not yet comfortable identifying edible boletes from the less-appetizing types, but that's going to come up eventually since they're a fairly low-risk venture around here. We're very, very interested in permaculture and silvopasture, and are really thinking about this in terms of "how can we take care of the land so it takes care of us". Good luck with your house search though! It must be a super interesting time to be on the market, with everything going on.
Actually yes! Thanks for the reminder—we’ve been so busy I’ve barely even looked at hubski in the last two months. I’ll grab some photos, put together a couple posts, and let you know when they’re live. Everybody’s heard of fiber-to-the-home, but we did fiber-to-the-woods, and now have gigabit internet in the middle of nowhere.
Alrighty guys--I have one more big update that I'll post after this weekend, because I need some more photos, but I went ahead and put up a few updates showing off the last couple months of work!
You've got a nice, cozy camp set up. What's your plan for getting food while you're out there? Someone else I know who lives off grid has a solar fridge that acts as a thermal battery.
Very cool link, thanks for sending that my way! I have very similar plans for refrigeration, unfortunately this has been a heck of a year to try and buy a chest freezer. It's been months since I've seen one in stock around here. We have a few different plans in action for food... we have shelf-stable goods sufficient for us and the dogs for six months, plenty of deer and turkey in the area, and a shelf-stable cache of seeds sufficient for about 3-4 years of growing seasons. Hopefully all of those, plus what we can forage off the land, will be enough for us in the long-term. The very first thing we did in 2019 when we bought the land was put in a whole bunch of fruit and nut trees, since those will take a few years before they're producing.
They’re two “ale pail” buckets that I had because we brew beer—they’re foodsafe plastic buckets with spigots. The top bucket is open, and then has a tube running to a Sawyer water filter (like a Lifestraw) via the spigot. The output on the Sawyer runs to another tube that feeds into the bottom bucket via a hole drilled in the lid. We just dump buckets of water from the creek or from rainwater into the top bucket, and it fills the bottom with fresh clean drinking water.
Nice blog! I read the whippoorwill winter post and it reminded me of the very first time I took my wife camping. Borrowed a bunch of gear, and should have thrown the extra sleeping bags in the car instead of just the two that looked best... And then the cold front arrived early.
It's unbelievable, isn't it? I've never felt so unprepared for something as I did that night. We couldn't believe that the night was a full 60 degrees colder than the day. The next morning, we got in the truck, drove to the closest town, and just sat there in the parking lot of a Walmart going "...so... we almost died, didn't we?"
This is very cool! Judging from the bear I guess you might be near VA if not in it...but I guess bears really can be anywhere in the SE. I’m only about a 2 hour drive from Shenandoah now that I’ve moved and definitely want to make camping there a priority come spring. But I’ve never had to contend with bear concerns while camping before, so it will be a new learning experience.
The good news is that black bears are super skittish. Make noise, give them their space, don’t leave food out, and you’re generally ok. Unless a black bear has cubs with her, they’re pretty easily spooked. And congrats on the move! Do lots of camping, it’s good for the soul, you know?
I had to take a quick break from parasail glide-biking for charity just so I could read your blog! You may not be a daredevil helicopter pilot saving babies from brushfires, but I would say saving your entire family from vicious "needlejets" via heroic discus throw counts for something.