I'm finally getting land...

Simon,

It's a normal bitter-sweet experience for homesteading. This one is bitter.
I think that I'm closer to civilization than you, but if I left my animals for few days (assuming that they had food) I would probably find them dead. Something would come, dig and kill - usually some dogs that roam properties looking for easy prey, but are difficult to spot when the owner is present.

Development of raw land is a difficult endeavour and it quickly burns any available amount of money, so job is a must. You basically start with nothing. Things that we take for granted in the city: roads, drainage, sewer, water, electricity, shelter are simply NOT there and have to be developed from scratch.

You have to have a full picture in mind, but never think about more than one or two steps at a time, otherwise it will overwhelm and depress.

If you need some temporary structures use pallets and lumber screws. You level the terrain and quickly erect something temporary but quite sturdy.
For anything long term I would never use any lumber in California. I was in the middle of wildfire last year. Mobile (or not) houses, wood posts, fences were incinerated in minutes.

You will need some used pickup truck or a small trailer to haul materials.

Here are a couple of photos of the bucket that was apparently bitten open by some large animal.  The teeth marks actually puncture the plastic.

I'm actually a little scared of whatever did that.

Cristobal yeah it's not fun.  I miss the birds, I feel awful for letting them get eaten, and I feel really stupid for thinking that they would be safe by themselves with basically no protection.  What was I thinking?

> Development of raw land is a difficult endeavour and it quickly burns any available amount of money

I know, but I think I have a good plan.  The problem is that I can't seem execute on it.  It's been weeks and I haven't even gotten a chicken coup built.  At this point it's a matter of regrouping, collecting my wits, and getting it done.  That's my way: give up, cry like a baby, then carry on as if nothing happened.

> For anything long term I would never use any lumber in California. I was in the middle of wildfire last year. Mobile (or not) houses, wood posts, fences were incinerated in minutes.

Oh yeah, I've seen the videos.  That's part of why I'm so gung ho to make rock walls.

I also understand we can't go against nature. We will not win over nature. Nature would win. We will either go with being a part of nature as we were, or if we did destroy nature it would be destroying ourselves, we cannot go on without it. So we will do best to do our part in it the way humans were doing at their start.

I would live like that with providing for what to have to eat, with a place to live, not taking anything from wildlife that is around, with having things growing in ways that do not attract and support pests that would come. There are ways we can be smart with that. Using what can grow most naturally in that area is best.

I would not choose to have animals to use. Any animals there to care for should have real sanctuary, where we keep them safe. There will need to be planning for that. Mistakes from the past are what we are to learn from.

> I also understand we can't go against nature. We will not win over nature. Nature would win. We will either go with being a part of nature as we were, or if we did destroy nature it would be destroying ourselves, we cannot go on without it. So we will do best to do our part in it the way humans were doing at their start.

I agree.  My working theory at the moment is that Nature produced us to help life escape the Earth.  In approximately 800,000,000 years the Sun will become too radiant and life on Earth will become physically impossible.  I believe that Gaia knows this and developed us large-brained talking primates with dexterous hands to build the means to spread to the rest of the Universe (which, as far as we can tell, is barren.)

I believe that the evolution of human intelligence had to have a disharmonious phase due to the nature of intelligence itself, but now that we have got our bearings and have some idea of what's going on, we will rapidly settle down and get to work.

Now, I want to be clear that I have no actual idea if this is anything remotely resembling the truth, it's just what I choose to believe to make sense of the world around me.

What I hope is that we can harmonize ourselves with the rest of the living world and become again natural, with our scientific knowledge and the machinery to carry Nature to the rest of the as-yet unliving Universe.

> I would live like that with providing for what to have to eat, with a place to live, not taking anything from wildlife that is around, with having things growing in ways that do not attract and support pests that would come. There are ways we can be smart with that. Using what can grow most naturally in that area is best.

I think about this a lot when I'm working on the land (the few minutes that I've worked). Everything I do destroys lives (of bugs and plants and little animals) and habitat (e.g. the nest of little mammals that I uncovered when I was clearing the well head.)  When I cut down the dead branches interfering with the tarp (and being a fire hazard) I remembered the morning that I saw them draped in spiderwebs in the nearly-horizontal early morning sunlight.  Beautiful!  Homes of dozens!  Catchers of small flying insects!

But it's got to go.

The two things that makes me feel okay with it is the reflection that all creatures alter the "zone" around their homes, and I'm going to disrupt and destroy as little as I can to make my home.

I hope one day that my activities will provide scope for ever more life than I necessarily destroy.  But the priority in the moment is to be as little-destructive as possible.

> I would not choose to have animals to use. Any animals there to care for should have real sanctuary, where we keep them safe. There will need to be planning for that. Mistakes from the past are what we are to learn from.

Yeah, I really messed up.  Looking back I really don't know what I was thinking.  That's one of the factors that makes me think that I should wait until the heat passes: it seems to make me stupid.

Simon Foreman wrote:My working theory at the moment is that Nature produced us to help life escape the Earth.  In approximately 800,000,000 years the Sun will become too radiant and life on Earth will become physically impossible.  I believe that Gaia knows this and developed us large-brained talking primates with dexterous hands to build the means to spread to the rest of the Universe (which, as far as we can tell, is barren.)

I believe that the evolution of human intelligence had to have a disharmonious phase due to the nature of intelligence itself, but now that we have got our bearings and have some idea of what's going on, we will rapidly settle down and get to work.

Now, I want to be clear that I have no actual idea if this is anything remotely resembling the truth, it's just what I choose to believe to make sense of the world around me.

What I hope is that we can harmonize ourselves with the rest of the living world and become again natural, with our scientific knowledge and the machinery to carry Nature to the rest of the as-yet.

Everything I do destroys lives (of bugs and plants and little animals) and habitat (e.g. the nest of little mammals that I uncovered when I was clearing the well head.)  When I cut down the dead branches interfering with the tarp (and being a fire hazard) I remembered the morning that I saw them draped in spiderwebs in the nearly-horizontal early morning sunlight.  Beautiful!  Homes of dozens!  Catchers of small flying insects!

But it's got to go.

The two things that makes me feel okay with it is the reflection that all creatures alter the "zone" around their homes, and I'm going to disrupt and destroy as little as I can to make my home.

I hope one day that my activities will provide scope for ever more life than I necessarily destroy.  But the priority in the moment is to be as little-destructive as possible.

Looking back I really don't know what I was thinking.  That's one of the factors that makes me think that I should wait until the heat passes: it seems to make me stupid.

We can go far ahead of ourselves in our thinking. If it were true we evolved to be large brained primates to take life beyond this world when the sun is too inhospitable to it before 800 million years or however long it would be, and if so evolution would not just stop there, there would not be humans then and even if large brained beyond that the descendants of humans will have other traits to continue successfully and large brains would not always continue either.

But we are in our present time for our lives, if nature provided for us that we could take life elsewhere we would be responsible for all life here now, and not with viewing other life as what should be left out, or left behind.

My own view is to live with the least impact on life around me, that it can continue. So I would keep trying to grow food for myself, with any that might be with me, with strategies to not have pests come so much as to be a problem to that. I would be careful to the insects and other small life around, which properly belong to nature.

I don't know what we'll become, or how it will happen, if humanity survives this environmentally destructive phase of our civilization, but I figure one way or another we would move out into the rest of the Universe eventually.

In the meantime, yes, living with minimal impact on the life around me is very important to me.  I hope and believe that it's possible for humans to return to a harmonious relationship with the natural world around us, to properly belong to nature ourselves.

Just a little update on the eve of the new year.  We've been holed up in the city for the last three months.  Things got pretty tight but we made the payments on the land and my sister got a great new job, so we're more-or-less back on track.