Alder Burns

The website ic.org is a good place to start.  It's the premier site for intentional communities and ecovillages of all sorts.  It's worldwide, and searchable both by keyword and location.

Be sure to join Georgia Organics, and try to participate in the Southeast Permaculture Gathering held every summer near Asheville.  When I lived in GA these were the two main venues to connect with local comrades.

I've often mentioned this very idea as a comment to people who are building (or buying!) elaborate solar (or otherwise) dehydrators.  I once spent weeks building one of these, and it successfully dehydrated nothing!  In addition to a vehicle...the attic space of many houses, and any unused greenhouse or cold frame in the summer are viable alternatives.  The old greenhouse at the farm I used to live at, shut up and with a fan running on the screens, is how I know that a whole goat, boned out and sliced into small slivers, will fit into six quart jars when dried down!  Now, I regularly get sliced tomatoes snap dry in my attic...

I've been moving some extremely heavy gate fence posts...treated 6 inch rounds, eight feet long, with concrete attached to one end, around my place with a dolly.  I laid the dolly flat, got the post up onto it, heavy end down, and tied it securely in place.  Then with gloves I pick up the far end of the post, and it is then supported on the wheels of the dolly at the other end.  Balanced just right, I can then wheel the post wherever I want it....provided it's dry weather, otherwise the wheels would get stuck!

I always keep a collection of nice sticks for tool handles and keep my eye out for more...nice long straight ones of the right species can be hard to find in some places. The way I learned it, you cut them green, trim roughly to length and cut any branches (hopefully not too many, as knots make peeling and smoothing more difficult), and then paint some oil on the cut ends and knot stubs.  Then put them somewhere dry in the shade for a few months at least.  The oil keeps the stick from drying out too fast and cracking, instead it dries out slowly through the remaining bark.  Then when I need a handle I take one, shave the bark off with a drawknife, shape the end to fit the tool end, and attach however!  Over the years I've found the best species are hornbeam, hickory/pecan, and oak.  I have some ten year old handles of all three.  Around here at least there is no ash left anyway.  Right now I've got some Bradford pear sticks curing as an experiment...nice and straight but I wonder if they will be too brittle.  The heads of various tools seem all too easy to find...just last week my neighbor had a whole set of fiberglass handled tools by his trash can....post hole diggers, shovel, and rake, with splintered handles---but I'm after the heads!

Seems like it might be time to consider investing in a woodstove!  Especially if you have more old trees fixing to come down or need dropping!  Is there no demand for firewood in your area?  And a big, sound oak, (judging from the look of the logs in your photos), might find interest among woodworkers.

Two ideas I don't know whether I've seen elsewhere or earlier in this thread:
1. for black soldier flies...choose a barrel with a removable lid or rig another loose lid like a scrap of metal, and have a hole in one spot on the bottom along the edge.  Tip the barrel at just the right angle, something like 45 degrees, so that the hole is at the lowest point, add your feed and get them going on it. The hole drains the liquid, and the angle allows the mature grubs to crawl up the bottom of the slope and drop out into a collecting  bucket.  Totally simple compared to so many designs out there!
2. make barrel silage!  Take a clean barrel without lid and pack it full of grass clippings from mowing. Try to have a mowing project so that your barrel will be trampled tightly full in two days or less.  When it's chock full then tie and duct tape a couple layers of heavy plastic over the end and leave it in the shade.  To feed it, open it up and the very top layer will be moldy, compost that, and everything underneath will be aromatically fermented!  Picky animals sometimes won't eat it till it's dried out in the sun and wind first. Grass is meat once removed!  I've even read of plans to do this with things like dry grain straw, chopped up, with urine added to it as it's packed....the nitrogen enables the stuff to ferment down and become more nutritious!

 

Before I had plenty of silica gel packets to use, I would simply use salt....I'd put about a quarter inch of salt in the bottom of the mason jars or other containers that I put packets of seed into, or else tied up in a little cloth packet for jars of loose seeds.  Salt has the advantage of caking up when it gets moisture in it, so it gives you a warning that it needs recharging.  Thinking about it now, I imagine that sugar might do almost as well as salt.  Maybe even flour?  All of them are things that in ordinary use you absolutely don't want to get moisture into, and they all absorb it readily from the air.

@ Timothy....those look more like dogbane shoots than common milkweed.  I don't think milkweed are ever purple stemmed like that. Not good for food for people or for monarchs, though it's a good fiber plant according to some.