A morning in the life of a broke would-be forest gardener

Got woke up early this morning by a dog who wanted to go out. Noticed it was still grey and cool and dewy before 7:00 AM. Decided to put on my good work boots and go out in the woods before it got hot. Here's a few of the the things that happened in the next hour and a half:

1) Noticed a big honey locust thorn buried in sole of good boot. Well, that's why my sweetie bought 'em for me after I shoved a thorn an inch into my foot through my sneakers. Rummaged up pliers, removed thorn, finished putting boots on.

2) Went outside and checked air in tire of $14 yard sale wheelbarrow. Confirmed tire still holding air after yesterday's puncture repair. (Yup, it was a honey locust thorn that took out the tire, too.)

3) Wheeled barrow around to back yard container garden and tree nursery area. Loaded up barrow with a bucket, some tools, and some surplus plants for planting out in the woods to sink or swim. Selected persimmon seedlings, some peanut starts, and a chestnut seedling.

4) Started across mother-in-law's lawn toward gate into forested area. Noticed a bunch of tree-of-heaven saplings that have been annoying me and deterring mother-in-law's mowing guy. (She's ancient and set in her ways, she's gonna have her lawn and her mowing guy for the rest of her years.) Whacked saplings with machete and threw them over the fence into my wild area for future use as weed control mulch.

5) Passed through gate, noticed that a stump of an osage orange tree I hacked down last year had shot out about two dozen yard-long new shoots. Whacked them off with machete and stowed them in wheelbarrow.

6) Stopped to unload osage orange shoots for use as mulch around base of transplanted sand plum. Got distracted for five minutes running around in circles reducing horse nettle infestation with my machete.

7) Proceeded past huge honey locust tree with its lower branches removed to above my head height. Noticed many volunteer honey locust seedlings sprouting under tree, stopped to chop them with machete. Accidentally chopped on the backswing and destroyed one of three wild passion fruit vines I had trained up the tree in early spring. Said dirty word. Then looked closer and realized that none of these three vines are actually passion vines. Said another dirty word. Made self feel better by comparing leaves with known patch of passion vines a ways away; leaves not a match but the known patch was doing very well.

Used machete and shovel to clear away weeds from pair of six foot circles, dug out three-foot circles with shovel, planted persimmon/peanut/persimmon triangle in one circle and persimmon/peanut/chestnut triangle in the other. Not much hope any of it will survive the hot summer but I sprouted many more things than I have room for in my zone 1/2 container garden and small in-ground garden beds. Got to put it somewhere. Even one unseasonable soaking rain during the summer would give this stuff a chance, and we might get lucky.

9) Proceeded to edge of property where a utility company has done some really poor-quality excavation under the power lines and left rough ground with pits, ditches, and piles of soil. Stopped beside a pile of soil that I hope to return in wheel-barrow loads to my container garden and nursery area for use there. Whacked weeds away from potential digging spot with machete and shovel.

10) Took last two seedlings from wheelbarrow (watermelon and canteloupe in peat pots) and planted them in previously-prepared spot at the end of an accidental ditch where water sometimes accumulates. Noticed spot was being shaded by a cluster of poke plants that have shot up to almost 6 feet tall in the last couple of weeks. Grabbed machete and filled wheelbarrow with leafy poke stems, while filling bucket with tops and largest leaves. Took wheelbarrow and bucket back to new planting areas and mulched heavily around the persimmon, chestnut, and peanut plantings with the poke stems. Left bucket full of tops.

12) Returned wheelbarrow to soil pile, shoveled load of soil into wheelbarrow. Returned wheelbarrow to spot where I left the bucket. While loading bucket, heard hissing noise. Noticed barrow tire now fully flat. Dirty word time again! Didn't even get one round trip to the woods out of this repair.

13) Sighed, picked up all tools and bucket of poke tops, started carrying them back to the yard. Noticed funny long pod growing in osage orange tree, which is odd because osage orange trees don't have long seed pods. Did a double take, realized I was looking at a green snake in the tree. A new sight for this northern boy! Hello, snake in tree.

14) Left tools and bucket of poke tops in zone 2 container garden, returned for wheelbarrow. Attempted to drag loaded wheelbarrow with flat tire, got about 10 feet, dumped soil in handy spot, returned to yard with flat-tire wheelbarrrow thumping behind me.

15) Took bucket of poke tops around container garden, carefully weeding in select containers and then mulching like mad with the green poke leaves.

16) Ambled over to look at garden zone under large oak tree that I am reducing in size so that I can garden near it. Noticed fresh oak leaves on branch that's slated for removal when I get around to it. Stripped armload of new oak leaves off branch and tucked them in as mulch under the greenery on a nearby hill of potatoes.

17) Remembered that propane delivery is due; took machete over by propane tank and hacked down big armload of leafy mulberry branches and saplings that were impeding access to the propane tank. Carried armload over to vicinity of a recently-planted cherry tree and spread as mulch over some grassy tussocks that I haven't found the energy to dig out yet. Noticed (rather too late) that some of the saplings were wrapped in a vine that might or might not be poison ivy. Too tired by this point to say another dirty word while staring at my bare arms, looking for new rashes.

18) Went inside, took long hot soapy shower to hopefully remove as much toxic oils from my skin as possible, seriously considered going back to bed.

Scoring:

Goal of retrieving load of soil for container garden: FAIL
Goal of planting out surplus seedlings: ACHIEVED
Plantings opportunistically mulched with surplus biomass: 12+
New fauna observed: 1
New skin rashes attained: to be determined
Physical obstructions cleared with machete: 2
Decline in number of functional wheelbarrows: 1

Was it disorganized? Yeah. But not a bad morning in the woods for all of that. However, I think the match goes to the honey locust trees on points. Sometimes I win but those infernal trees *always* score some points.

Hahaha, I can really relate to this! Add twin three year olds orbiting you, a one year old in a backpack and various animals' needs interfering and you've got a snapshot

If I had twin three year olds I would totally give them sticks (and possibly padded headgear) and turn them lose to whack all the horse nettles out of the ground. No doubt somebody would end up bruised and crying but that ENERGY! There's got to be some way to harvest it.

Dan - great post! I think this exemplifies "working with what you've got" as well as illustrating that permaculture is not always (or even EVER) a straight line from point A to point B. You really should consider submitting this story to Permaculture News. Next time you load up your mobility-impaired wheelbarrow, throw your digital camera/smart phone in there too!

PS: As a desert dweller where every tree, bush and weed seems to have thorns, I use only solid rubber tires. More costly but cuts WAY down on dirty words and thumping tires. Of course, you don't get the cheap thrill of dragging home a full barrow-load of soil on a flat tire...

First rule of wheelbarrow repair: replace pneumatic tire with a solid rubber tire. A wheelbarrow with a pneumatic tire is like a foot wearing a sneaker.

Sometimes when I am bouncing around my land I think about Bil Keanes' Family circus . The panels in which the travels of little Billy are drawn in a dotted line like a map . Won't make sense to some , but makes sense to me . I guess permaculture keeps you young at heart .

http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&p=family+circus+little+billy+travel+map

John Elliott wrote:First rule of wheelbarrow repair: replace pneumatic tire with a solid rubber tire. A wheelbarrow with a pneumatic tire is like a foot wearing a sneaker.

Love the simile! So true.

Jennifer Wadsworth wrote:PS: As a desert dweller where every tree, bush and weed seems to have thorns, I use only solid rubber tires. More costly but cuts WAY down on dirty words and thumping tires. Of course, you don't get the cheap thrill of dragging home a full barrow-load of soil on a flat tire...

Oh, if ONLY!

You'll notice the word "broke" in the thread title, and my reference to the "$14 yard sale wheelbarrow." I knew I had written about this wheelbarrow somewhere; turns out it was in a series of emails to my sister. Here are excerpts:

Yesterday was "free garage sale" day in a nearby city -- the one day of the year when you don't need a permit. So the place was lousy with insane women trying to sell dirty used baby clothes for top dollar. But I did find one old boy with two yards full of junk, chickens running around underfoot, one pissed-off dog (because he was chained up which he was clearly not used to) and a wheelbarrow. Tire was flat, there was junk in it, and the plastic tub was blown out, with an open crack running the full length of the bottom. On the bright side, he only wanted $5 for it. I didn't dicker.

Tire took air readily but lost it all again in an hour. So I need to patch the tube or (if I'm smart) find a solid tire; we have so many honey locust thorns I'm not sure keeping the innertube tire is anything
but a recipe for frustration.

As for the blown-out tub, I drilled out the ends of the cracks, drilled some more pairs of holes along the crack, and wired the crack together in a gross mechanical-support way using 5" pieces of nice copper wire I stripped from a piece of Romex the dogs brought home to chew on. Then I got the edges lined up as best as I could and hit it with a $4.00 tube of LocTite epoxy for plastics. There was a lot of crack and I may yet go back for another tube, but the repair looks good for hauling leaves and hay and dry soil. (I don't think I'll be carrying more than two cinderblocks at a time in there though, nor dropping them in from a height.)

Price tag: $9 so far. From a subsequent email:

Took the wheel off this afternoon and pulled out the tube. I haven't patched (or assisted with patching) an inner tube since our kids-with-bicycle days, except for that time at gold mining camp in the 1980s (not sure if it was the summer you were there or not) when the bear bit our wheelbarrow tire. So it's been awhile. I guess this proves that having a wealth of unusual life experiences comes in handy eventually, right? Anyway, I am gonna get a cheap patch kit at the Walmart, which is where I am going next.

And from the next one:

Got the wheelbarrow tire patched last night and aired up this morning. If it's still firm tomorrow, I'll call it ready for service!

Patch kit cost $3.00, two trips to the coin-op air machine another $2.00. Total cost to me: $14.00. (I've since found a $1.00 bicycle pump at a garage sale, to get rid of those air pump machine visits.)

So, yeah -- I need a solid wheelbarrow tire in the worst way. The only one I've found locally, though, cost more than forty bucks, which is more than I have handy. Perhaps the garage sale gods will provide, or maybe I'll start shopping eBay or Amazon for a cheaper one.

Possible way of making the tire last a bit longer - line the inside with newspaper between the rubber and the tube. Done it - worked better than just rubber and tube! Trust me - I get "broke".

Jennifer Wadsworth wrote:Next time you load up your mobility-impaired wheelbarrow, throw your digital camera/smart phone in there too!

After the time I stood and sat for ten minutes in the woods with my sneaker nailed to the bottom of my foot as I tried to figure out how to remove the honey locust thorn without pliers, I have tried to be very good about carrying my cell phone in the right chest pocket of my overalls. I had it today, but the only photos I took were of the snake in the tree.

So here it is, a snake in a tree:

John Elliott wrote:Harbor Freight

Nice, John! Harbor Freight won't ship to me (they won't do P.O. Boxes and the parcel services can't reliably find us) but that's helpful nonetheless. Sadly it does look like even the cheapest solid tire out there is going to cost twice what my wheelbarrow did if I have to buy new.

Jennifer Wadsworth wrote:Possible way of making the tire last a bit longer - line the inside with newspaper between the rubber and the tube. Done it - worked better than just rubber and tube! Trust me - I get "broke".

Now, that right there is a suggestion I can use today, and I never would have thought of it myself. Thanks!

Dan Boone wrote:However, I think the match goes to the honey locust trees on points. Sometimes I win but those infernal trees *always* score some points.

But the rematch, and you know that there will be one, could go to you - http://www.leevalley.com/US/garden/page.aspx?p=10140&cat=2,44639,33271. If the British Army uses it, I'd say that pretty well seals it - http://www.linseal.com/video/linseal_demo_asf.html

Great summary of your day:).

That snake looks like he's going to sell you car insurance.

Mike I am skeptical of that product, and yet I just may have to try it! At least it's closer to fitting within my budget, especially if they sell it in dmaller bottles than the one shown. Thanks!

Dan Boone wrote:Mike I am skeptical of that product, and yet I just may have to try it! At least it's closer to fitting within my budget, especially if they sell it in dmaller bottles than the one shown. Thanks!

Whoops. I should have said that I've used it on one of my mower tires that had the slowest of leaks for the longest time that suddenly became the fastest of leaks overnight. Now it's not a problem. In fact, after a winter of sitting in the same spot, the tire was only slightly soft and only noticeable if you knew the history. I will be doing the other three tires since I have hawthorn and buckthorn to deal with where I run the mower.

Sweet! Personal testimonial helps with the skepticism.

Dan Boone wrote:
Scoring:

Goal of retrieving load of soil for container garden: FAIL
Goal of planting out surplus seedlings: ACHIEVED
Plantings opportunistically mulched with surplus biomass: 12+
New fauna observed: 1
New skin rashes attained: to be determined
Physical obstructions cleared with machete: 2
Decline in number of functional wheelbarrows: 1

Was it disorganized? Yeah. But not a bad morning in the woods for all of that. However, I think the match goes to the honey locust trees on points. Sometimes I win but those infernal trees *always* score some points.

Thanks for the laughs Dan. Consider it a 'typical' day. Count your blessings when it goes better. Realize there will be days where it goes even worse. It's all meant to build your character (love, joy, peace, PATIENCE...). It's not WHAT happens it's how YOU REACT to what happens. Consider it all joy. There is no failure just feedback. Sometimes you just write about it, have a good laugh, look at your garden and smile.
Oh and get a 'thornless' honey locust. I have seed in the fall and spring that come up 95% thornless. Such a pleasant tree, smells great, looks great, feeds the bees, oh and no THORNS.

I also had two blow-outs before I spent the 16 euros and got a rubber tire. Works less well on rainy days (9 months of they year) but at least you don't have to mess with it. I have black locust and that puts holes in tires and (yay!) rubber boots.

William

Stefan Sobkowiak wrote:
Thanks for the laughs Dan. Consider it a 'typical' day. Count your blessings when it goes better. Realize there will be days where it goes even worse. It's all meant to build your character (love, joy, peace, PATIENCE...). It's not WHAT happens it's how YOU REACT to what happens. Consider it all joy. There is no failure just feedback. Sometimes you just write about it, have a good laugh, look at your garden and smile.

Yup! I made some progress and got some things planted, so nothing to complain about.

Stefan Sobkowiak wrote:Oh and get a 'thornless' honey locust. I have seed in the fall and spring that come up 95% thornless. Such a pleasant tree, smells great, looks great, feeds the bees, oh and no THORNS.

Ha! Yeah, that would be awesome. But it's easier said than done, given my circumstances. These honey locusts here are wild/native -- they are all over the property, at every stage from seedling to mature tree to standing dead snag. I am clearing out all the seedlings and saplings in my zones 3/4 and trimming the lower branches of the mature trees, but even that much will be a labor of years to complete with hand tools and the amount of hard labor I'm willing to put in. Without some serious mechanically-assisted logging help that I've currently got no way to pay for, the mature trees are here for the long haul. And they are such nice trees in every other way, I'm not sure it would be smart to get rid of the mature trees even if I had a way to do it, which I don't. Replacing their functions with thornless trees would be a project of decades, and I am already middle aged. So my current plan is to take them down only as and if I need the space and light for fruit trees, and it's going to be several years at least before I have any space conflicts of that sort.

To be honest I had been focusing my sharply-limited hand-tool tree-felling efforts on surplus Osage Orange trees, which we have in even greater abundance and which I consider less useful (because of their curved growth habit and non-leguminous nature). But that was before I discovered the existence of Che fruit, which apparently thrives when grafted onto Osage Orange trees. Now I'm treating the Osage Orange as potentially-useful food forest trees, which means that as I have the energy, I'm bushwhacking into each tree's circular thicket of curved ground-sweeping thorny branches and trimming the trees back to the point where I can walk under them, but leaving the rest of the tree to thrive as it may until such time as I can secure a supply of Che scion-wood and start my grafting experiments.

William James wrote:I also had two blow-outs before I spent the 16 euros and got a rubber tire.

I had no luck finding a solid airless tire locally at a price I was willing to pay. But I did find a cheaper and locally-available brand ("Goop") of the gunk Mike Haych recommended up thread. I hadn't considered the self-sealing anti-puncture compounds because my experience with them was in an automotive context, where they tend to fail miserably due to the demands of highway driving, and where they can make it difficult to repair a damaged tire that could have otherwise been fixed. But for wheelbarrows, which are low speed and low pressure, they make more sense. I simply poured half of an $8.00 of bottle of Goop into my wheelbarrow tire and aired it up, and it's been holding air ever since despite several more trips into the woods. I am calling it a success for now.

Glad to hear you found goop. I use "green slime" in my wheelbarrow tires and garden wagon tires, have not had any flats in two years now, no matter what sort of nasty I manage to run over. I have also found that a sheet of heavy polyethylene (can be found in the cooking area of most grocery stores as a thin cutting/ baking sheet. Or if you have a hobby lobby type store, they usually have the material), cut to size and slipped between the tire and tube will stop most thorns, nails, etc. from making your tube go flat.

Something that offroad motorcycle riders use: http://www.tireballs.com/

Expensive, but the link is for the idea not the product.

I think you could find something like tennis balls that would work in a wheelbarrow tire (although they aren't cheap either unless you score them for free somewhere).

Tubeless and slime/goop has always been my best luck on tires. NO TUBES!!!.

I just want to know how long your machete lasts.

Thanks for the laugh. That sounds like every day I spend on my little property. I call it "puttering", as in "What did you do over the weekend?" "Oh, I just puttered around.".

Yeah, usually I just say "I'm gonna go play in the woods" when I leave the house, because I have no real idea what I'm going to do until something necessary catches my attention. There's a thousand years of potential projects at the rate I'm going, and I'm not gonna last that long.

My parents were rather poor when I was growing up. Most of my dad's paint came from "rescues" from the local dump. If a can of latex house paint was too dried to use, but still semi pliable, he'd pack them into his various yard tires, with a bit of liquid paint to help fill in the gaps. It seemed to work fairly well, at least as long as the rest of the wheel barrow or whatnot would last.

I asked myself really what is the point of a pneumatic tire on a wheel barrow and came up with no pros, only cons.

Since then I have made a couple of wheel barrows using a bicycle wheel with no tire. I found that having no tire was fine since I was not rolling over pavement, and in fact the rim digging into the ground acted as fine traction under load. If you could find some scrap bicycles you may be able to find a wheel that you could mount onto the wheel barrow.

For now I use an old trash bin like this


And it works for now.

Back in the day, there were a lot of farm carts and vehicles that got by with iron-hoop wheels.

As for the wheeled garbage can, Sam's Club is currently selling a nifty little "garden cart" that's basically about a 15-gallon garbage can on two big wheels. They want $17 that I didn't have extra, so I didn't buy one, but it looked very handy.

Four years ago I wrote extensively about my $14.00 wheelbarrow:

Dan Boone wrote:You'll notice the word "broke" in the thread title, and my reference to the "$14 yard sale wheelbarrow."  I knew I had written about this wheelbarrow somewhere; turns out it was in a series of emails to my sister.  Here are excerpts:

Yesterday was "free garage sale" day in a nearby city -- the one day of the year when you don't need a permit.  So the place was lousy with insane women trying to sell dirty used baby clothes for top dollar.  But I did find one old boy with two yards full of junk, chickens running around underfoot, one pissed-off dog (because he was chained up which he was clearly not used to) and a wheelbarrow.  Tire was flat, there was junk in it, and the plastic tub was blown out, with an open crack running the full length of the bottom.  On the bright side, he only wanted $5 for it.  I didn't dicker.

Tire took air readily but lost it all again in an hour.  So I need to patch the tube or (if I'm smart) find a solid tire; we have so many honey locust thorns I'm not sure keeping the innertube tire is anything
but a recipe for frustration.

As for the blown-out tub, I drilled out the ends of the cracks, drilled some more pairs of holes along the crack, and wired the crack together in a gross mechanical-support way using 5" pieces of nice copper wire I stripped from a piece of Romex the dogs brought home to chew on.  Then I got the edges lined up as best as I could and hit it with a $4.00 tube of LocTite epoxy for plastics.  There was a lot of crack and I may yet go back for another tube, but the repair looks good for hauling leaves and hay and dry soil.  (I don't think I'll be carrying more than two cinderblocks at a time in there though, nor dropping them in from a height.)

Price tag: $9 so far.  From a subsequent email:

Took the wheel off this afternoon and pulled out the tube.  I haven't patched (or assisted with patching) an inner tube since our kids-with-bicycle days, except for that time at gold mining camp in the 1980s (not sure if it was the summer you were there or not) when the bear bit our wheelbarrow tire.  So it's been awhile.  I guess this proves that having a wealth of unusual life experiences comes in handy eventually, right?  Anyway, I am gonna get a cheap patch kit at the Walmart, which is where I am going next.

And from the next one:

Got the wheelbarrow tire patched last night and aired up this morning.  If it's still firm tomorrow, I'll call it ready for service!

Patch kit cost $3.00, two trips to the coin-op air machine another $2.00.  Total cost to me: $14.00.  (I've since found a $1.00 bicycle pump at a garage sale, to get rid of those air pump machine visits.)

So, yeah -- I need a solid wheelbarrow tire in the worst way.  The only one I've found locally, though, cost more than forty bucks, which is more than I have handy.  Perhaps the garage sale gods will provide, or maybe I'll start shopping eBay or Amazon for a cheaper one.  

Well, sadly, it's time for an update.  The $14.00 wheelbarrow has died beyond hope of repair.  

The leaky tire has stayed leaky, and I never did find a hard tire to replace it.  I did, however, come across a new inner tube for it, so this morning's job was to unship the wheel and swap in the new tube.  However, when I went to unbolt the brackets that hold the wheel on, I discovered that the square tube steel that the wheel brackets bolt to (that extend all the way back under the tub and become the handles) was dissolved away to nothing under the paint, just a mass of corrosion masquerading as steel.  Basically as soon as I put a wrench on those bolts, the nose of my wheelbarrow fell off.  Whoopsie!

Price of new wheelbarrows being what it is, it might indeed be worth buying a replacement set of wooden handles as illustrated in this thread.  But not for this wheelbarrow, which is a mass of rust and busted plastic from stem to stern.  Somewhere along the line I spent five bucks for a much better wheelbarrow (steel tub, better wheel) whose only flaw was an existing set of busted wooden handles.  So my next step is to source a set of replacement handles and get to work.  I'm not as broke as I was when I made this thread, so it's practical.  If I had better woodworking skills, the boss move would be to make my own handles out of Osage Orange or Honey Locust or persimmon.  But I'm not that good.

I got a lot of work out of my $14.00 wheelbarrow before it died, though, and I'm still going to make a planter out of the tub...

Dan Boone wrote:

7) Proceeded past huge honey locust tree with its lower branches removed to above my head height.  Noticed many volunteer honey locust seedlings sprouting under tree, stopped to chop them with machete.  Accidentally chopped on the backswing and destroyed one of three wild passion fruit vines I had trained up the tree in early spring.  Said dirty word.  Then looked closer and realized that none of these three vines are actually passion vines.  Said another dirty word.  Made self feel better by comparing leaves with known patch of passion vines a ways away; leaves not a match but the known patch was doing  very well.

So what was the passion fruit vine lookalike? Blue passionflower?

You had me laughing aloud
I really enjoyed your thread: it reminded me of when a doctor thought she could remedy my difficulty with concentration due to a lingering low grade tooth abscess (before it turned into sepsis) by prescribing Ritalin 🤣