Went down south for just under a month to do some traveling. Now we’re back and on volcano watch, hoping the ash doesn’t gum up our summer plans too much when she blows…
Wife had some work to do so I came back to the homestead by myself. Drove the ATV up and a big ole mama moose was laying by the trail near our solar, she stood up but hung out as I passed. Got to the cabin and got settled in and within thirty minutes I went out onto the deck to see if I could call DJE. I called her and across the trail on the other side of the forest I saw her pop up still wearing her winter coat. Ten minutes later she was in the cabin collecting food she stored under our stairs (she seems to be under the impression we won’t go on vacation) along with a whole bag of raw chicken wings I gave her. Can’t have my weasel hungry.
Later that evening I went out onto the deck and within sixty seconds I had hand fed my one eyed Guard Squirrel (who changed out his insulation in the house we built him so I need to clean up the old stuff now piled below his house), fed a nuthatch who landed on my hand, then talked to a snowshoe hare still wearing white to inform him there was an ermine in the area (he went under the deck anyway unconcerned) and then said goodnight to mama moose who came on over to the cabin to munch on some grass.
I feel fortunate to have such nice neighbors. I missed them while I was gone, and I know they missed the food I try to buy their affection with. And the bears are starting to wake up so it’s time to get this bear spray ready…
I’m not sure which market is more risky as I sit here waiting for a volcano to erupt while the wildfires have started early and, of course, we have frequent earthquakes.
But I feel very fortunate (at least for now) to have land that provides electricity, heat, water, food and lumber whatever the oligarchs decide to do. And with ten years of food stored in a root cellar for the wife and me (thanks to the freeze drying machines we bought several years ago), it’s a great hedge against inflation and emergencies.
During the Great Depression, those with land who could grow food, did much better than city dwellers (some didn’t even notice the depression). It was a time when people had their ability to determine value re-calibrated. As I tell my friends, get land and the ability to produce the things you need to survive, then consider playing in the rigged casinos our masters have laid out for us.
My partner and I are considering more and more purchasing land for farming (less icy alaska and more tropical jungle) these days. Its about time to do less consuming and more producing.
That’s awesome, now is a great time to do that. Get away from people and the traditional economy and property prices drop fast, but price to build goes up. Connect to the Internet way out in the sticks through satellite or cell phone tower and you can still clock in if you need to. Solar is great and insulates you from the aging grid infrastructure and ever increasing price of electricity. Makes a great deal of sense.
Tropical will be great for growing food. In Alaska our growing season is short, but my approach has been to freeze dry food we buy primarily while we learn to grow food. So far we’ve gotten pretty good at growing potatoes and last summer added collard greens, bak choy, onions, peas, broccoli, and lettuce and it worked out. Eventually we’ll build a greenhouse and scale up.
While it is great for growing food, everything and I do mean everything wants to eat the produce.
There is also permanent rot and decay going on because of the pervasive moisture.
The strategy to preserve is different: while vinegar and salt goes a long way, that doesn’t really prevent fungi from growing. I am thinking about using a UV lamp to “clean” the air hopefully significantly reducing viable spores of various kinds on the food being prepared.
DJE is slowly changing into her summer wardrobe. It’s interesting with the “dire wolf” tech headlines to think of genetic mutation outside the lab. Amazing to think how many animals change their colors for winter and then back in the spring. Natural selection, accident, across multiple species with that kind of timing? I’m not persuaded by the random mutation argument.
On another note, Ryan (I think that’s his name, the bald dude with the awesome sense of humor on the news show) mentioned monitors instead of smart TVs. What are some good flat large monitors that people use? Would love to kick smart TVs to the curb and just use a Pi and a monitor.
A random mutation alone is not enough and nobody states that. It’s the pressure a dynamic system exerts on individuals in a species in regards to survival and reproduction. It is also important if the mutations in the gene is dominant or recessive in regards to how much chance it has to spread and the behavior of the animal, for example if it will mate with it’s siblings which would make this more likely. But mutations occur a lot and there are also a large number of ermines out there.
Oh you have started a nice stockpile. I am jealous. I wish I could do food preservation but since I am very limited on space right now I only have the means to store emergency rations for a month but that is about what I can do right now. But I strive to have a basement or culvert full of durable food one day too. I hope though I will never need it and I definitely hope I won’t need it before I have created a stash.
How will you bear proof the greenhouse. I figure you need to let sun in and bears will figure out there is food in there. Or will you use a shut off setup with grow lights?
Add Darwin and biology to the list of things I’m not equipped to understand, it’s a long list. But I can’t shake the feeling of skepticism that random mutations which just happen to provide an advantage somehow lead to evolved species. I would think if that were the case, we’d see far more interesting mutations from time to time (“oh look, a walrus with an outboard motor and a solar panel, wonder if that will work out, and over there, a dog with a boot on top its head”). Maybe not that weird, but something along those lines. Evolution obviously happens, I’m just not convinced its random mutations. I was under the impression that Darwin’s theory was about random mutations, some that worked, some that didn’t, but again I’m very ignorant on the topic.
For a small space, freeze drying is a great way to build a stash. Takes room for the machine, that’s a downside, but because it removes water it makes it so light and compact that you can fit a ton of food in closet.
The greenhouse will likely be a wallapini style, mostly underground, and I think we’ll just put an electric fence around it to keep the moose and bear away from it. We do also want to have a smaller underground LED-powered greenhouse just to try to grow salad vegetables year round, but that’s going to take a lot of power in winter so I’m going to wait on getting our full system up before doing the math on that one.
My current predicament is getting DJE to stop storing meat on our deck. I’ve convinced her not to store her food in our cabin, but she has now run Guard Squirrel out of his house and is storing halibut in there. That won’t bode well when the bears finish waking up and smell that, they’ll be destroying our one-eyed squirrel’s house in no time (I should get this electric fence around the deck working…). I saw her on video yesterday run up his log to his house and then saw him run out his backdoor. I initially thought she was squirrel hunting rather than house hunting, I ran out to his house and she just poked her weasel head out the front door and looked at me like “what?” Later that same day I caught her storing her fish in there. So I’ve got to figure out how to keep her out of that house.
There’s also the field of epigenetics which is more about the regulation of the genome in response to the environment. Some of those changes can be inherited, so it’s not all completely random.
It also just takes a very, very long time since most mutations are harmful, and the rest of them probably won’t really stick unless they impact reproduction in some way. Once you start looking at giant multicellular organisms(like your friend DJE), then we could be talking about many hundreds if not thousands of individual mutations in order to make any easily noticeable change.
It’s great to hear somebody who thinks before they buy a creature. When I was young I didn’t make that same calculation unfortunately, but after some age and after being married when we got our ferret we had the time to dedicate and it made all the difference. Plus we got our ferret young and she was remarkable. Potty trained (still plenty of accidents), no cage, she listened, we went on walks without a leash, she traveled with us everywhere and she was incredible. Very loving and joyful. She would point at the fridge, just stand there and point at the fridge, when she wanted a cherry tomato (she was a vegetarian, can’t explain it, but she was offended by meat, would not eat it). Normally the fridge opened and she got what she wanted, but sometimes I’d say “no” and she’d shake her head and leave. She’d sleep in bed with us, get up in the middle of the night to use her litter box, then crawl right back into bed. I still remember one time she was trolling one of the cats who was twenty times her size and how she got him all worked up and annoyed and when he finally broke down she laughed at him, it was a legit laugh you could see on her face. Great animals.
But a ferret in a cage that doesn’t get attention is a travesty.
With her passing, however, and the cats both gone, we’ve decided no more pets. Can’t handle the heart break anymore. Hence our hybrid model on the homestead.
Took out the first squirrel tick of the season, many dozens more to go. Please tell Wendell that I’m doing the Lord’s work with him in mind, genociding on these parasites, so if he wants to send me a 5090…
