Homesteading Aspect Oddball Thread

Here is my annual oil furnace maintenance. The annual maintenance is
-Change the oil filter and gaskets
-Change the nozzle
-Clean the exhaust from the furnace to the chimney
The process is, turn off the power to the furnace.  Close the oil line. Change the nozzle and reset the igniters. Change the oil filter and gaskets. Open the oil line and bleed out the air. And clean the exhaust.

I did a fairly major homesteading project this past fall which seems to fit best here in the homesteading oddball category.  I've been heating with wood for a few years now.  When I made my RMH several years ago I also decided to start storing my firewood in an outbuilding.  This certainly helped me get drier wood, but the outbuilding wasn't really a woodshed.  It really needs to have more airflow to function better as a woodshed.  So at last I have made myself a proper woodshed.

It is 12' x 16' inside with a roof area of 20' x 20'.  I wanted wide overhangs to help keep out rain and snow.  By keeping the interior floor space under 200 square feet I was able to avoid needing permits from my township.    In order to get great airflow but hopefully keep out the snow/rain I made the walls of woven branches harvested from my homestead.  I suspect these will need to be remade over time, but my property should easily be able to keep producing enough material to do this.  I haven't experience any driving snowstorms yet, but thus far the walls have been working exactly as intended.  I also chose to do a living roof, though it is only a shallow layer of soil.  Hopefully it will be enough for some hearty plants to take root and protect the roof from degrading in the sun over time.  I don't have a photo of it but the seeds I scattered to start things did sprout.  At the moment it is all covered with snow.

I used power tools for cutting the lumber and cordless drills to screw the screws.  Other than that though this was done by hand.  I cleared the land with a shovel, axe, and loppers.  Lots of roots had to be dug out, including lots and lots of poison ivy roots.  (Ask me how I know they were poison ivy!)  I leveled the land with a shovel, though I'll admit I wasn't too concerned with it being terribly level.  All the branches used for weaving the walls were harvested off my property and cut with a pair of loppers.  The post holes were all dug by hand with a shovel and post hole digger.  I would estimate I ended up using 6 to 7 yards of topsoil for the living roof.  This was moved with a wheelbarrow and thrown up onto the roof by hand one shovelful at a time.  I would throw up about 3 wheelbarrow loads then climb up on the roof to spread it out gently with a rake, taking great care to not puncture the plastic layer.  I was concerned that the soil would wash off in the first big rain if I didn't have a good enough mat of living roots in it, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  The slope is shallow enough to prevent this.  Actually it's quite interesting that after a hard rain water drips slowly off the lower edge for several days.  

So how long did it take me?  I don't really know.  I didn't keep track, but it was my primary project for some weeks.  By this I don't mean a side project after work.  I mean it is what I did all day every day.  Let's see, I figure I have about 5 days into weaving the wall panels, including gathering the materials for that.  Probably another 5 days working on the living roof.  Site clearing and basic frame construction I'd estimate at 1.5 to 2 weeks, lets just say 10 days.  So about 20 days overall working 8 to 14 hours a day.  Call it 200 hours.  Can that be right?  Seems like a lot, but it was a big project keeping me fully occupied for a long time.

Permies demerits for this project would be the use of treated wood for the posts, though I didn't use cement when setting them.  Time will tell if that was an error, but I was reading conflicting thoughts on that.  More demerits for the plywood used on the roof.  I did try a bit of Mike Oehler's PSP technique for some small zones where soil is bermed up against the posts.  I've been wanting to try that for decades.  We'll see how it holds up.  Hopefully I can get some offsetting bonus points for the woven wall technique.

I think that's about it.  I submit this for consideration of homesteading oddball points.  If there are questions please ask.

I was part of a community garden and I wanted to increase involvement by getting rid of some barriers. Literally, barriers. Two members had hurt themselves badly while gardening because of tripping and falling and they each gave up gardening because of it. More importantly, I wanted to ensure that my kids were safe and could be allowed to harvest from the garden whenever they wanted without hand-holding. The square gardening approach wasn't implemented very safely. There were so many things to trip on, way too much rebar sticking up to impale someone, the irrigation was right in the narrow walkways (and this was after a prior effort to add pavers to even create walkways), the perimeter of the garden made it difficult to get to the garden, nails were sticking up, etc. I was also keen on getting rid of all the plastic and galvanized metals.

I rallied for buy-in. I sketched a new layout using oval-shaped plots along walkways near irrigation so that the hoses were easy to move and access. I got rid of the railroad ties and pavers. Not only did I remove all the awful parts of the existing infrastructure, I also added new fun elements and added garden access. I added:
--a flower and bean tipi wrapped with twine
--3 ft hugelkultures at the bottom of the slope to also catch water that I planted with perennials including asparagus and strawberries
--trellising archways
-- expanded the garden area to have an additional access to the west. The sod removed from this area was overturned and used to build the hugelkultur.
I moved the topsoil from the new walkways to the garden plots and mulched the walkways with 6+inches of mulch. Each garden plot was composed of polycultures that I had started from seed or were perennials from the previous garden layout.

The flow of the walkways improved dramatically, walking paths were large enough for wheelbarrows to enter the garden, and irrigation access was also improved dramatically.  The garden was previously underutilized and the sum of all of these functional, layout changes rejuvenated the vision and intent of the land to a state that is now much better than it ever was before. I wasn't part of the first iteration of the garden but I created and implemented a new vision for iteration 2 that will incur less maintenance and have more longevity.

Over the course of a year (which happened to be the first covid summer where I delighted in having something engaging to do outside), I spent well over 500hrs reviving a community garden where I would estimate that at least 300hrs were expended on manual labor. I did not have access to machinery and I'm a 5'0, 130lb female so perhaps I'm not as strong as a professional but I work efficiently and strategically with a shovel and suite of wheelbarrows. In those 500+hrs, I did everything from generating interest and buy-in, making plans, taking inventory of materials and supplies to leverage, starting seeds, pulling out the old, installing the new, planting the polycultures, watering, teaching, and harvesting. The September bounty was abundant! The new garden club more than doubled in participants. All of the time I spent transforming this garden was a gift.

Today I experienced a functional problem in the bathroom of my homestead - the towel hanger by the shower experienced a catastrophic failure.
I knew, through experience with my toilet paper roll holder, that I’d need to invest in a robust solution to overcome, and hopefully permanently prevent, future similar failures.

I found some matching oak from my pallet project, removed the bracket which had started to fall out, cut the board, hand planed, sanded, measured, drilled, mounted, and finally replaced the hook and towels.

All this took me about an hour and a half