I don’t post nearly as often as I would like. I’m not going to make any excuses. I just don’t dedicate the time necessary to write as much as I could. It’s probably more laziness than anything else. With work, household, kids, and I’ll admit. I like to watch TV. But I do think about writing almost every day and I can say I write some pretty good stuff in my head. Somehow though it never seems to come out the same when I start banging it out on the keyboard.
I have a lot of projects in my mind that I want to accomplish, but I think sometimes I enjoy the thought of projects more than the actual project itself. I like to research and learn about new skills and I have the desire to do all these things myself, but seem to lack the ambition. Yes, yes I know that is a choice. However I am geeked about a slew of things that I want to accomplish in the spring, summer, fall of 2013…an early resolution list if you will.
So here is the list:
- Build 1-2 Kenyan Top Bar beehives. I would like to harvest my own honey and maybe make some mead. Hopefully I’ll have some left over to give as gifts to friends and family.
- Build an outdoor clay oven, permanent structure, with built in wood storage. I just know this is the key to making great bread and pizza.
- Keeping with the food theme, Build a smoker, I’d like to be able to smoke pork, and cheese. So a dual purpose cold/hot smoker. I’m still researching plans for this.
- A chicken coop. There is nothing better than farm fresh eggs. I grew up tending chickens and would like to have a small flock. Eggs and great garden manure.
- Add to my garden a couple of 4×8 raised beds. I think potatoes, carrots, beets, rutabaga (can you say pasty?) would thrive well there. I’d also like to add a 10×25 patch of wheat, y’know for the bread.
- A shed for my lawn tractor, bicycles, and garden tools. I need to get them out of my garage so I can have a better shop.
- Fix and expand my deck.
I think that about does it for the project list. I know it seems aggressive, but it is all part of my overall plan to be more productive and start working toward a more sustainable lifestyle. I want to rely less on store bought food and grow more of my own stuff and put it up for the winter months. This fall I put up 11 pints of salsa, 6 stewed tomatoes, and 6 spaghetti sauces. Not a lot but it was a start. I was going to put up some hot pepper relish however, an early frost knocked out my peppers. I think a good goal is to have 3 months of food in store just in case. My wife or I could lose a job and having a store of food would help defray grocery costs. A lot of people think that prepping for bad things is a little paranoid, but I’ve lost a job before and it gets tight real quick. Power goes out, tornadoes hit. It’s good to be prepared and have an action plan.
The bees, well I think bees are cool and I like honey, if nothing else I’ll give a swarm of bees a place to land and pollinate plants, if I get a little honey, that’s great, if I get a lot of honey, my Christmas expenses just got smaller. Clay oven? Power goes out, I can still cook. I’ve had pizza in a stone oven before and it is tasty. The smoker, well if you’ve ever had smoked pulled pork, then you know what I mean. It is awesome. Not only will these projects get my family ones step closer to self sufficiency, it will also teach my boys (and me) some skills in building, masonry, gardening, etc. It will bee good quality time spent doing something productive together rather than playing video games and watching TV.
I plan to spend the winter months planning the projects, doing research and developing the schedule. As soon as the weather breaks, I want to get started. Hopefully by putting this out in a public forum, people will ask me how it’s going and that will help motivate me to actually do it.
I might even keep a blog journal on the progress on the projects and include some pictures and hopefully inspire someone else to do the same thing.
Peace
The Zen Dreamer 