Setbacks

Today I spent all afternoon making a new cage to cover raised beds. After much profanity, fit throwing, deep breathing episodes to regain calm, two trips to the hardware store, and glue (a lot of which I got on myself), I went out a few minutes ago to carry my new project off the deck and into the yard. I bumped the railing on my way out and the whole thing sprang apart.

This latest version of the cage was to be shaped like an upside down u, unlike the design featured in my last post, which was a box. I thought the u would be easier to make and easier to get chiken wire onto. It involved bending lengths of PVC pipe to make an arch. But tension and PVC don't go together too well, apparantly.

I spend between $40 and $50 on supplies for this project. Though I glued all the joints, all of those came apart at one point or another, but I had to use a hammer to get one apart that I hadn't glued. I might be able to salvage these parts and make a new box cage. But I am sick of this shit really.

I guess I shouldn't be discouraged. At least I'm walking the walk at last. This morning I harvested some spring weedflowers from my yard and added them to scrambled eggs. (The Purple Dead Nettle and Henbit featured in the photo). For dinner I put them in a peanut/sesame sauce on noodles. While they didn't have outstanding flavor, they didn't have an offensive flavor, and hey, they are fresh, free greens. With vitamins and all that.

I have a few blackcurrant shrub seeds sprouting, and my edible weed bed is covered with seedlings. Now I just have to get two more beds up and running so I can grow non-weed greens in them. And make cages for those to keep the squirrels, groundhogs, and cats out. Sigh. And cover the raised bed area with mulch, which I haven't found a cheap enough source of yet. Sigh again.

This permaculture stuff is expensive.

A thankful shout out to that helpful Ace Hardware guy at the Pisgah Church Road store. Wish now I'd looked at his name tag.

More Solargon/Urban Homesteading Thoughts

The cat was sick on Wednesday, and it made me glad we aren't living in just 700 square feet of alternative housing. Were that the case, the entire dwelling would likely have been polluted with cat shit.

Tessa, our 11-year-old ginger cat, has been more affectionate and needy lately so I suspected she wasn't feeling well. I went out for about 20 minutes Wednesday morning and when I returned, my suspicions were confirmed.

She jumped onto a bar stool in the kitchen to be petted. When I did so my hand came away cold and wet, and when I looked I saw splotches of shit all over her back.

Tessa is growing out a lion cut, which means when her long fur was cut the groomer left a puffball at the end of her tail. That puffball looked like a paintbrush freshly dipped in brown paint. Tessa likes to walk around and switch her tail about, so she'd splattered herself and gone Jackson Pollock on some walls. I found smears and spotches here and there all over the house. If this had happened in a Solargon, the density of the catshit contamination would have rendered the home uninhabitable. As is was in 1,300 square feet with both doors open I gagged twice in the process of cleaning up.


Sick cats aside, I know a clutter counselor/organization coach who could probably show us how to live in 700 square feet of alternative housing without resorting to murder-suicide. But when I think about it, I realize we've been in this situation before.

Before we were married, Wyatt lived in separate dwellings and had a mortgage each. It was like the universe knew we were about to get ahead, because Wyatt got laid off right after we got married and a couple of months after that I was hazed into quitting my job. I managed to sell my place despite the crashing real estate market, but since then sharing a residence and mortgage has not made things as easy as I'd hoped. We both went back to school, which required some cash outflow, and the economy tanked, which sucks because both our current jobs depend on people having disposable income they want to part with.

I'm not sure what kind of devilish feedback mechanism is at work here. Perhaps it's the Law Of Conservation Of Shit To Worry About, which I wrote about here and here.

Still, when I read articles like this, I am once again prompted to obsess about alternative housing.

Theoretical Urban Homesteading

Was talking to a friend about my obsession with round alternative houses. She lives in one of those Glenwood bungalows I mentioned here. It's a great house, but like many houses built in the 1920s and 1930s in Glenwood, it needs a lot of work. I told her the larger Solargon house kits cost around $36,000. "It would almost make more sense to tear my house down and put up one of those," she said. But that's exaggerating, first because she estimates it would only cost around $20,000 to fix up her house, and also because her house has more than twice the square footage of the Solargon.

Plus there are a lot of other Solargon costs, because you'd have to factor in the price of the lot for a building site, and cost of pouring a foundation, and costs of getting somebody to put the Solargon together and wire and plumb it, new appliances, etc.

Then again the Solargon is likely to be more energy efficient and save money over time, partly because it is small. And rehabbing an old house is always more expensive and complicated than you thought it would be.

I have a large husband and two cats. I don't know how well we'd all fit into about 700 square feet laid out like this. It's not terribly different from what we have now, just smaller, but we'd certainly have to get rid of a lot of stuff. But we got rid of a lot of stuff when we got married and moved in together, and it was painful at the time but in retrospect not such a big deal. If it meant being able to jump off the hamster wheel of bills and debt, well I don't think we'd notice the lack of stuff so much.

When I think about it, the biggest space problems we'd have are related to books, kitchen stuff, clothes, and cat litter boxes. Not that cat litter boxes are all that big, but you can't put them just anywhere. Built-in storage might solve the book, kitchen stuff and clothing problem, but living in a small space with litter boxes is still going to be tricky.

I went on vacation to Mongolia one year, and spent some nights in a ger (otherwise known as a yurt). From the outside they don't look very big at all. But something about the roundness and openess of them makes them seem pretty big and comfortable on the inside. They're covered in felt. It was astonishing how cool they were in the scorching-ass heat of the Gobi desert, and how warm they were in the cold Hinti Mountains once somebody lit a horse dung fire in the stove. I love round living spaces.

That's one thing I'd want in my Solargon that might be hard to engineer and would take up valuable space: a wood stove. Though I would probably try to burn horse or cow shit in it. To hell with chopping wood. Cow or horse shit is probably one of the most renewable resources on the planet. We could sneak into pastures, or hell, maybe even get permission, and bag up free heating fuel every winter.

Our biggest obstacle is that we're already pinned down by mortgage payments, don't have enough cash handy to outright pay for land and a new Solargon, don't want to have two sets of mortgage payments, and the housing market sucks so it might take a while to sell our place. Renting makes a lot more sense in some regards. When you want to move you just give notice and leave regardless of how the real estate market looks.

More Dreamhouse Thoughts

Have been thinking a lot about the Solargon house issues mentioned in my last post, and have decided that daydreaming of the ultimate homestead site is a safe alternative to alcoholism or crack addiction, so I'm going to indulge in it.

As long as I'm dreaming, I want a geodesic greenhouse too.

And I want to put one of these freshwater fish farm and salad kits in it. The greens and herbs in the long tray are fed by fish poop, and in subsisting on fish poop they keep the water healthy for the fish in the big tank. I think it's intended for tilapia farming, but I'd probably try native bluegill in there.

It would be nice if we could live in an Eco-Village of LEED-certified houses like Solargons, maybe 20-30 of them, either in the city or somewhere within 15-20 minutes of it. I want my friend W.M. to live there. Hear that, W.M.?

More about this topic later.

City Corn

We came across this smart use of space on State Street in Charleston, SC, this past weekend. Here we have some young corn. You can barely make out the round leaves of the Eucalyptus growing underneath it, and there's a Rosemary bush planted on the other side of the Palmetto trunk there.

Evidence seems to indicate that the Permaculture Phantom may have struck here.

I think there may have been residences in the building at this address. Let me explain why this plot shows efficient energy planning. It uses space that would otherwise go unused, but the best thing about it is it's probably in the gardener's Zone 1. That means that the gardener isn't going to have to travel far to grab a handful of Rosemary if it's needed, so the chances that he/she will burn dinner while he/she is gone is minimal. This corn looks much less shriveled than its relatives in fields outside Charleston, so it's probably getting some water here and there, which is also easy because it's planted close to the house.

I suspect that the gardener planted the corn's companions intentionally, too. Eucalyptus and Rosemary oils are commonly found in organic insect repellents. They both have a strong, clean smell that bugs seem to hate, so they may be protecting the corn from those nasty worms that get in under the shuck sometimes.

Plus, it's pretty.

Fergus the Permaculture Prince

Wyatt and I are looking for a house. But we don’t want to pay a whole lot for it because we want to pay it off quickly, and we need it to be in a safe neighborhood because we like to walk a lot, and it would be great if there were some cool restaurants or a coffee shop we could walk to from our home, and it needs to be on a fairly large lot so we can grow some of our own food, and IT’S JUST FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE!

But I have hope.

We’re trying to reevaluate our methods of managing life in an effort to make said life more stable and satisfying. As a general guideline, we’re using Permaculture philosophies to streamline our use of time, space, and wealth.

Both Wyatt and I have college educations. I have a Master’s degree I haven’t finished paying for yet. Both of us have always driven at least 20 minutes to get to work, and much of the time we’ve had jobs we didn’t like. We’ve spent a lot of time fretting about auto repair and gas expenses. We’re frequently overextended, temporally and financially. We don’t feel like we have enough time/money/whatever to do the things we love, and we wonder what we’ve been working so hard for since college.

Let’s look at Fergus McFaydden. Fergus is a resident of my former neighborhood, an author and artist with probably the best movie collection on the east coast. I haven’t talked to him much in a while, and I’ll bet he’s spent zero minutes studying Permaculture principles. But in my mind, Fergus is the king of sustainability.

I met Fergus in the late 1980s when I was a punkass kid hanging out and trying to make friends with people old enough to buy me alcohol. At 19, I got thrown out of an MD 20/20 party at his apartment. I remember thinking he was really cool because he knew Harlan Ellison. At that time he walked to work at the Kinko’s copy place a couple of blocks away. Did he need his MFA in creative writing to have that job at Kinko’s? No. But he did need to be enrolled in school for as long as possible to have access to the nearby campus fitness facilities, and of course since he’s a writer it didn’t exactly waste his time. All of the elements of Fergus’s life seem to support each other – that’s the key.

Fergus still walks to work at Kinko’s, still lives in the neighborhood, and does not own a car. I don’t think he drives at all. That’s okay because there are convenience stores nearby and he has plenty of friends who will give him the occasional trip to the grocery store or to the movies. He’s quirky and interesting and cultivates relationships with others like himself, so parties at Fergus’s are really outstanding and everyone goes home with stories to tell. Except for Fergus. He stays home with stories to tell. It all comes to him, and he doesn’t have a car payment or the insurance and other (speeding and parking tickets) expenses involved with car ownership.

Another way Fergus saves his own energy by drawing social contacts to himself is with his reptiles, and this is also another example of multiple elements supporting each other within his life. Fergus loves the lizards, and it just so happens others do too. Many’s the time I’ve seen Fergus out for a stroll with one of his gargantuan iguanas. Fergus is not an extrovert, but a big lizard on your back will make people come up and start talking to you. Especially if you’ve put a funny custom-made hat on it. Even though he’s not an extrovert, Fergus knows a shitload of people. People with stories to tell, people who like to hear his stories, people he can tell stories about.

According to Permaculture principles, the things you rely on most need to be closest to you in what’s called Zone 1. A Permaculture practitioner will plant the plants which need the most care and are often needed in the kitchen close to the house, like right outside the door. Having the things you need most in a handy spot saves you a lot of travel and frustration. Fergus has work, a coffee shop, several good restaurants, and a broad social circle in what I consider an urban Zone 1.

Fergus has always had his priorities straight, so he’s been able to focus on what’s important to him and obtain a yield from it. He’s published two novels and some short fiction, and a scandalous magazine cover he did the art for got banned in Canada. I never did anything I wanted to like that because I lacked focus – I was always too busy fretting about some crisis or other related to being spread too thin and dedicated to things that weren’t going to give back to me in the long run.

I never would have left that neighborhood, but I couldn’t afford to buy property there, and I was tired of renting. I figured that if I owned my own place and the ceiling started leaking, at least I would know why it’s not getting fixed. I had to look a long time to find a place I could afford in a neighborhood I could walk in, or leave home without worrying that the back door would be kicked in while I was gone. And I love it here – I met Wyatt in the laundry room. I have great friends in this building. I can walk to Fisher’s Grille or bike downtown.

But I am absolutely going nuts to harvest rainwater and grow perennials. You can’t do that with a condo.

The picture posted up top is what I’ve managed to do on my balcony. The bigger leaves of the chard you see were pretty good in a salad we had for dinner Sunday.

I’ve got big ambitions to sow Austrian Winter Pea and greens this fall in a yard somewhere in a neighborhood where I can walk to work and socialize with cool neighbors. My fingers are crossed! Wish me luck!