PEP Badge: Oddball

Making Sourdough Starter in support of the BB for baking two loaves of bread. They're going to be sourdough. So first, I ordered sourdough starter from Heirloom Sourdough, a strain that was established in San Francisco in 1916 on the Wharf. I put the 14 grams of starter in a wide-mouth Mason jar with loose fitting lid, and added 28 grams of lukewarm (filtered) water, and let the starter dissolve for 20 minutes or so, then added 14 grams of all-purpose flour and 3 grams of King Arthur whole wheat flour, as directed by Heirloom.



I did this twenty years ago with Oregon Trail starter, a nineteenth-century strain you can still only get by sending in a self-addressed, stamped envelope. We moved several times and I eventually killed it through neglect. But even if the starter ended up being a ruse, my local airborne yeast will take over and make me a happy baker again.

If you want to see progress on the viability of the starter, I'll post a follow up message next weekend. At which time I'll probably be baking my 2 loaves of sourdough bread.

j

We just bought our place last year. It's a 1930s house that had been neglected by the previous aging owners for at least the last ten years, probably the last twenty. So I'll post a buffet of some pictures and a description of the work that we've had to to do so far. My husband put in many hours of work and my dad and some friends of ours helped too, but all the hours I’m listing are mine.

I've spent at least 14 hours scraping off wallpaper in two different rooms. I should have just caved and rented a wallpaper steamer, but I'm stubborn and a cheapskate, and I didn't learn my lesson from the first room, because I did it again. We were just going to paint over the nasty wallpaper like we did elsewhere, but in both cases the most recent layer of wallpaper had not been glued well and it was billowing away from the wall.

I’ve spent about 2 hours filling in drywall holes with spackling and a scraper in several rooms.

The previous owners left a water leak going in the kitchen for the last 10 years. It took my husband five minutes to find the leak and stop it. And those 10 years of leaking destroyed 2 inch thick beautiful oak floors cut around 1927 from our local forests. Because of this and some other problems, we’re having to redo the kitchen. My husband tore out the floor, but we’ve both been tearing out the shoddy drywall, nails, and nasty insulation beneath. Plus an exhaust fan we found hidden behind the wall! I’ve spent at least 12 hours tearing out and cleaning up drywall.

I’ve spent at least 16 total hours painting over the nasty, oily wallpaper and blackened trim downstairs in one room and upstairs in 3 rooms. Oil primers, then top coats. Downstairs room with 9 ft ceilings, more than 10 x 10, so probably 360+ sq ft of wall. Upstairs, in the kid room, 8 ft ceilings, more than 10 x 10, so probably 320+ sq ft of wall. Plus our bedroom, 8 ft ceilings, about 15 x 13, so a little less than 450 sq ft of wall. It needed no wallpaper scraping (thank goodness!) and only paint. In his youth, my dad painted houses, so I’ve had a lot of help from him with many, many hours painstakingly painting the trim—something he actually enjoys.

(I do realize that one of the homesteading BBs is painting 200 sq ft of wall, but I’ll save the *other* upstairs room for that one.)

The previous owners left a nasty chicken house and a bunch of plastic bins and trash in the backyard. I spent about 4 hours taking down the chicken house, saving useful hardware, and carting away various other trash. Now it’s a lovely compost area and will become a garden bed this year.

Lastly, we got a letter from our insurance company that bumped up repainting the exterior wood siding on our house to the URGENT list, or we’d lose our coverage. Within a week, we scraped the flaking exterior paint, got together a 7 person work party, and we spent 7 hours that Saturday splashing a coat of primer over everything to get the insurance company off our backs. I spent 5 hours scraping paint that week, about 5 hours painting that Saturday (in between taking care of my six week old baby), and 2 hours sweeping and raking paint chips out of the yard. We still need to do another coat, but it got too cold before we could.

Yes, paint is not very permaculture-y, nor is conventional construction, but taking something neglected and making it beautiful and functional again is. And imagine if Otis has a neglected house?

In total, I’ve spent (at least) 60 hours doing work to renovate this house (so far).

Sorry this oddball post is so long! I figured one long post would be much less irritating than several. Hopefully that’s the case!

I didn’t take very good “before” pictures when we bought the place, so all of those are screenshots of a walkaround video I took, and might be blurry. Sorry!

I’m already doing the work anyway, so… whatever oddball points I get is totally okay with me.

The pictures I am going to be using are limited here since so many of my 'in progress' photos were lost. I am pulling images from secondary areas that display some of the evidence of the activity and prove before, during, and after. This was a massive undertaking for me at the time we began last year to build a fully prepared garden.

I got a windfall of pallet rails that measured 2.5 by 4.5 feet rectangles. These saved me a lot of time and money when I was short on both after just purchasing the house on the prior October.


The pallet rails

There were 18 total that were laid out so that they formed a square with 3 additional beds in the center. I then dug out the ground so that each bed laid flat despite the hillside, creating steps down with each bed along the way. Once everything was level and even, I screwed it all together to ensure nothing shifted.


You can see the beds laid out in the background

Each bed was lined with dampened cardboard, then filled with a locally sourced blend of river soil and mushroom compost. I have complaints about the quality I received, but that's not relevant to the BB. The bed were wet down to ensure no odd erosion issues would occur before we began building the fence. Stakes were placed at intervals, hammered into the soil and screwed in place. Chicken wire was wrapped around the entire garden and a gateway was built. We didn't put much effort into the gate due to already feeling the crunch of time, but the rest of it was done painstakingly. Once we began planting, we added a few structures such as a climbing rig for the peas to grow up. Up the hill, a semi-temporary greenhouse was constructed until a more permanent one can be built in a few years.

All of this was done on off days over the course of a month and a half as time allowed. I was still way more out of shape that year from the previous 8 years of sedentary work. Had I been in the shape I am now, it probably would have been done in a weekend or two. Still, the garden was productive for us in spite of the late start on getting things in. This year, we're using the greenhouse to get an earlier start on seeds and will be doing a full re-build of the garden with the better funding we have available to do so. The existing beds will probably be moved somewhere else on the property as a set of experimental beds or for things like asparagus to be planted.

Hey PEP-folks,

This is a fairly-odd oddball, but it was definitely in the spirit of "make stuff you have work for what you need".

I have: concrete form boards from jobs (2x6, various lengths), pallets, a 3/4 ton Chevy, Kubota tractor, and hogs.

I need: hogs taken to butcher.

So, step one is to buy a trailer to build a pen in the back of the Chevy.

Step two is to build a hog crate on a pallet for lifting them. So far, so good. Maybe 1.5hr of basic woodworking.

Step three is convince four hogs, politely if you please, to climb into a pallet-crate and be put in the back of the truck. This was about two and a half hours, and would have been improved with amusing banjo music playing in the background. It involved whey, sour mash, sight panels, several kids, the wife, and a lot of patience. But it succeeded.

Step four was to drive up to the butcher & drop off the piggies - they had a ramp, meant for lower decks. The pigs were pretty nimble, and got to enjoy a slide.

(Note, this effort was also noted in support of the "Commerce - sell something you grew..." badge bit here https://permies.com/p/2148436, but I am submitting the actual building of the crate & pen in this BB.)

So, using only what was on hand, we managed to get maybe 800lbs of piggie up into a pickup, and up to the butcher (one for us, three for friends). It also made me appreciate the simplicity of livestock trailers... maybe someday.

Total build time - 1.5hr. Not sure if loading time gets any cred for the BB, that was 2.5hrs. Thanks for considering!

Happy homesteading,
Mark

Hey PEP-folks,

Many of my prior BB submissions have yellowed photos, due to a Kapton tape patch over the busted camera of my phone (was crawling under a mobile home, rolled over a pebble in the wrong place). This got annoying after a while, or rather, after about 6 months... but I hate to replace phones frivolously, and the thing worked otherwise. Yes, I recognize that smartphones are nearly the definition of toxic-gick-consumer-electronics, but I accept that we all use them and the BB/PEP/SKIP system expects everyone to have one, more or less. Thus, I submit this phone repair as an oddball badge, expecting little for it, but recognizing that it's a sort of ultra-modern tool care, and better than chucking the thing and dropping $200 on a new one.

So, I finally looked up the replacement back cover for my Samsung S10e, and lo and behold, it cost about $17 on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZYJTHGF, which is an order of magnitude less than the phone, yay!

But the instructions started with "melt the glue in the back"... oh. So out comes the hotplate, which at least gives me thermostatic control (unlike my heat gun). 5min on the hot plate and have at ye.

Then the man on the Youtubes shivs it with a box cutter...oh. So they sent a little separator blade with the kit, and yea verily, it worked, though I can't say it was easy, and I hoped I wasn't jabbing anything sensitive on the inside. But the back came off (not without some damage, but it was the busted bit anyhow), the glue was more or less cleanable, and the new back has ready-made adhesive in it, so after carefully cleaning the camera and lens, on it goes. Squeeze it for a while to set the glue, and presto, it woke back up! The final photo is taken with the repaired lens (prior ones were taken with an old smartphone which I kept in the kitchen drawer for BB photos, but which lacks battery life & SD card space.)

It took me about 30min start to finish, though this was the first glued-back smartphone repair I had done. I miss the days when you could just open them mechanically.  But if it kept a phone from being annoying or e-waste, I figure it was time well spent.

Happy hacking homesteading!
Mark

hi y'all! this is my first submission and i submitted it to the oddball badge because i didn’t see anything specifically pertaining to shellfish harvesting in any of the other badge categories. If there’s another more appropriate thread i could post this please let me know!
Total time: 2 hours (45 minutes digging, 1 hour cleaning, 15 minutes cooking).
I harvested about a pound and a half (72) purple varnish clams, then cleaned them and made them into a chowder!

This BB submission is most closely related to the Dimensional Lumber Woodworking category, but doesn’t quite fit the bill for any of the existing BBs there.

We’re currently staying with my father-in-law and we brought our two angora rabbits with us. I built the yellow A-frame hutch (pictured below) while we were living at our previous house. Unfortunately, the rabbits started digging holes and taking a toll on the grass. So, we decided we needed a new solution. We aren’t staying here much longer so we didn’t want to build anything very extensive. We also wanted it to be easy to clean and comfortable for the rabbits. We decided to build a sort of table for the existing hutch to sit on so that we could continue utilizing the existing hutch.

My father-in-law has a bunch of salvaged wood and screws, so he offered to help me build the hutch table we had in mind. No new materials were purchased or used for this project.

I’ve included several photos of the build in progress as well as the final result, both with the hutch on and off. We built the table so that it has a lip around the edge to hold the hutch in place. We also chose to use boards for the tabletop to be comfortable for the bunnies to walk on, while leaving gaps big enough for the poo to fall through without risk of the rabbits stepping through the gaps and hurting themselves. It’s also easy to lift the hutch off to clean the base more thoroughly, as needed.

The table/base is roughly 68” long, 38” wide, and 34” tall. Build time was about two hours.

I recently read Toxic Conveniences by Darin Olien and felt compelled to remove all of the toxic gick from my house. I combed through the house 5 times. A lot of the stuff in these boxes I've had for over a decade and haven't used (and continued to move it from house to house... because I might need it?) and the majority of items I was shocked to find that they're made of terrible stuff because I thought we did pretty good. I also found that I had a hard time parting with some of these conveniences. If in doubt, I referred to the EWG product search website: https://www.ewg.org/ewgverified/, and removed anything that didn't have a 1 or 2 rating.

Toxic ingredients that I removed include fragrances, parabens, PFAS, petroleum (including any petroleum by-product), phthalates, tricolosan/triclocarbon (antimicrobials), and food coloring.

Other items that do more harm than good include sunscreen (unless it uses zinc oxide only), deodorant (I stopped using this years ago and don't need it), mouthwash (I never would have guessed this).

The hardest products to part with were menstrual products. It didn't make it into the box until the fourth and fifth walkthroughs partly because I needed to purchase alternative products but partly because I rely so heavily on this convenience. By the 5th walkthrough I couldn't stomach the possibility of using them knowing that they're made with PFAS and creates waste in the environment.

After speaking to a number of different local permaculture friends, the consensus was to donate all of these boxes to a local nonprofit organization that offers housing and rehabilitative services to women and their children who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. However, I didn't feel good about that. On one side, perhaps I would be displacing the purchase of new products that are equally as bad but I also can't give (in good conscious) toxic gick to women and children who are already at risk as it is. Can anything good come out of this effort?

I contacted a local recycler to see if there was a solution there but they would only work with empty containers.

So, I decided to keep all of the products and use them to educate my friends and family. I plan to use these products as teaching aids for future permaculture classes and any visitors to my house.

The biggest conflicts that came out of this effort was in removing aluminum foil, toothpastes, and floss. The aluminum foil will require adaptation to new bbq-ing methods while the toothpaste and floss conflicts were resolved with humble-brand tooth tabs that are made out of biodegradable packing and floss made without PFAS or plastic.

This was a lot of effort and I wish I had done this years ago.

I've been learning to tan hides! My first hide was an elk hide. I removed it from a roadkill elk. I guess it's not a common hide to home-tan, since elk are so large! Each step takes extra time.
For the process: I hung it in my friend's greenhouse to remove the hide. I got help with the lifting. But then I removed the hide, borrowed a fleshing drawknife, and soaked the hide in a lye solution. Then I pulled the hair off.  I used a brain-tan method, which does not use harsh chemicals for tanning. Instead, I used egg yolks! Then I stretched it across a bedframe. I scraped it again once it dried, since I didn't do a great job the first time. Once that was done, I cut the hide in two so I could manage the softening and stretching of the hide. I used coconut oil for during the softening. Then I smoked it over a campfire. Each step took a couple hours of work, except the stretching, which took 6 hours!
Altogether, it took me about 18 hours.
So far, I've made things like a leather thimble and simple turnshoes, which are part of the straw level textiles badge. However, I've also made an over-the-shoulder bag and a pouch that attaches to my belt. I even made the button on it out of wood from my apple tree! Because this brain-tanned leather does not have the same structure as chemical-tanned leather, its difficult to do things like add zippers, stamps, or other shaping methods. Consequently, the things I've made have a more primitive make-up. But that's ok. They're still functional! Just not up to snuff for the other textile bbs. I use waxed thread and saddle stiches for each of these little projects, which took about 4 hours each.

I've also been tanning rabbit hides. I've gotten pretty good at this. I either process the hides the same day as the meat, or I salt them. I don't like the freezer or pickle methods. They smell bad and take up room. Here's pictures of the process I like most. I loosen up a salted hide by soaking it in water. Then I peel off all the fleshy bits. After fleshing, I apply egg yolks for a brain tanning method, and let it sit overnight. The next day, I wash the hides for dirt, egg, and smell.... Finally, as the hide dries, it needs to be stretched pretty continually. The time it takes depends on the weather and the humidity. Then I've been experimenting with different finishes. I used mink oil and coconut oil in this set. I think I like the feel of using no finish better. These pictures show me processing 4 hides, which took about 2-3 hours of hands-on time per hide. (10ish hours altogether) I plan to make mitten lining out of these. Perhaps even a coat lining! We shall see.