Lindon Rose

Hi Amy, I know how the kids feel.  Our first year out here at the new place we put enormous work into preparing and planting ten 100-foot rows -- beans, corn, carrots, onions, potatoes, tomatoes -- the works!  What we didn't realize is that there is a small herd of deer roving the area and they hit our garden hard, night after night.  I tried lights.  I tried a boombox.  I tried spray repellent.  I even tried to catch them in the act.  What I ended up doing is building a nine-foot deer fence around the entire 100x100 foot grow area, plus another 50 feet on one end to get in with my tractor.  So far this grow season, no deer!  I see them grazing on the edges of my pasture and I know they'd be helping themselves to the garden if the fence wasn't there, but so far no trouble.  You can find those 10-foot fence posts on Amazon I believe, netting fence too.

Toby, I imagine a whole lot of work went into that "mini" rocket stove.  Looks great!  But I must correct you.  That is not a "mini" rocket stove.  THIS is a mini rocket stove!  I built the mold out of plywood, poured concrete in the bottom section (with hacksawed BBQ grill embedded in intake to set sticks and short branches on), then poured the top part.  It is heavy, probably about fifty or sixty pounds, but still transportable.  I've used it quite a few times.  It works great.  It is amazing how efficiently it burns the wood, and how much heat it produces.  But now I'm looking at your rocket stove again and thinking I would love to have one not just on wheels like yours, but also better built from the ground up.  My design is simple and cheap to make.  I guess it has that going for it...  Nice job!

I'm the exact opposite.  I launch into projects with minimal planning and often find myself having to "make it up as I go", or backtracking to re-do things that I got wrong, sometimes multiple times.  But you know what, I get a LOT of projects done.  In one year here at our new mini-farm I:

1) Built a 8' x 8' chicken coup
2) Removed horse/cattle pasture fence, enough of it to repurpose for the new "chicken pen" -- a very large area
3) Built and put into operation a 10000 gallon rain capture water tank
4) Roto-tilled and got ten 100 foot by 4 foot wide rows ready for planting
5) Hauled in dozens of pickup truck loads of composted horse and cow manure from surrounding farms to mix into my new garden rows
6) Grew a LOT of vegetables, corn and other stuff
7) Planted 100 hazelnut trees on one section of my property
Cut down a lot of oak trees that were in inconvenient locations and bucked them up into firewood -- got all that firewood stored in the shed

And a lot more.  Unless you're an expert on something, in my opinion, the best thing to do is plan your best up front knowing that you're going to have to learn as you go, then just dive in and DO IT!  It works for me at least.  My two cents worth.

Man, I gotta get me one of those!  I've been shelling my Painted Mountain corn by hand for seven years now.  I never knew such a device existed.

Here's a couple of pics.  I had an excavator come out and dig a 4-foot deep hole, but the location is on a slope so as it turns out the backside is 4 feet deep and the front side is only about 2.5 feet deep.  That's why I had to pile up a bunch of crushed rock around the front and sides, to keep the weight of the water from bulging out the front and sides.  It is nearly full now after a winter of rain.  Notice the inexpertly but still functionally built sheet metal roof that captures the rain water, making it legal, and drains it into the tank.  The cover is to keep light off of the water, otherwise fungus and mold would form.  This tank is at the top of my sloping property, and there is a long 1 inch PVC hose that I buried which goes into the tank and down to my growing area -- so gravity fed irrigation, which is what this is for.  But if it comes to it, I can use it as drinking water too.  The dimensions of this tank are 4.5 feet deep, 20 feet by 15 feet.  Lot of work, but glad I have it now.  BTW, Oregon land is too expensive for me too, but here I am...

In Oregon, it is legal to capture rain water AS LONG AS the rainwater captured is roof runoff.  I checked this out in detail seven years ago when I decided to build my own 10000 gallon rain capture water tank.  Now that I'm at my new place out in the country, trying to be a real homesteader, one of my first projects was to build a ten thousand gallon rain capture water tank.  I built a sheet metal roof over it to capture the rain and drain it into the tank -- that is legal here.  I also hijacked the downspout on my barn roof and route that water into yet another 5000 gallon water tank -- fills up really fast.