Greenhouse is in!

Greenhouse came in the other day.  It was a happy day at the Zydeco Ranch.  The nice Amish guy had to take all backroads to cross the valley so he wouldn’t have to get the oversize permits.  At least I think he may have been Amish.  He had the straw hat, garb, and the beard to fit the part.  His brother-in-law had similar outfit on, but drove the truck, and the BIL’s wife was in a polo shirt and worked at the co-op, so I wonder how much Amish they are.  I was hoping they would bring it on the back of a buggy, but whatever. 

They did a heck of a job on it.  They matched my roof metal trim to the building and even stained the wood to match the cabin’s wood.  They came, dropped it off, moved it about 10 feet to get it into the proper position, and even wrote up a work order and informed me that they didn’t charge sales tax, but they paid sales tax on all of the material.  Very ethical. 

It’s hot in it.  HOT.  Without the window open or the screen open on the door, it got painfully hot in there during the day.  I was extremely impressed.  I am hoping it takes minimal heat in the winter to keep it above freezing so we can grow veggies in it when it’s -30º outside. 

Beautiful wife thinks I should reconsider putting the chicken coop in there.  I was thinking of using the north face to enclose an area for the chickens.  My idea behind it was I could properly store the food in the greenhouse, I could heat the house for the chickens and plants using one heat source, and it would use the area under a proposed shelf, so no dead space in there.  Further, if it got too bad outside, I could let them roam free in the greenhouse for a day without freezing them.  She doesn’t want me to cut a hole in the side of the greenhouse.  She doesn’t like wasting space for chickens in there.  She’s worried that the chickens would get loose in there and eat our plants and roost at the top of the greenhouse.  But mainly worried that I would destroy the greenhouse by putting in a halfass chicken coop mess in there.

She wants to move the chickens to the barn.  Replace the tack room area with some nesting boxes, and hang some feeders.  I don’t know.  My issues about that are I have the chickens for their eggs.  If I let them run like that, they may find a better spot for the eggs.  Now I have to have an egghunt every day for my breakfast.  Further, my dogs can jump the fence into the goat pen.  That means now I have to count the chickens each day to make sure they are still around.  Even if we insulate the barn better, it will still be ice cold in there.  (The goats are happy all the way down to -10º before they get cold.)  It just seemed less work to put the chickens in the greenhouse. 

I think we may come to a compromise.  I might move the existing coop that is built against the house and move it to the chicken run near the greenhouse.  Got some extra logs that I can use for the back wall.

Our house, from where the greenhouse is.

The garden I have so far.  In the foreground is the old dish for TV.  They put in a new one and left the old on the ground.  Might use it to make the crazy neighbor think we have hidden cameras along the driveway.

Greenhouse, as seen from the porch.  We moved it after this pic so it would be lined up with the fence.

Inside.  It's 12x16 in the inside, 192 sqft, 8 shy of having to buy a $500 building permit.

Floor bracing, so it will stay square.  Good construction.

Friends in low places.

Was over at a friend’s house last weekend.  His wife works with my wife.  Him and I are in related fields.  We got to talking about the governmental downgrade.  He mentioned that he has no faith in the government and we are heading for a crash and if I was smart, I would start to prepare.  I grabbed him, brought him over to my wife and made him repeat it, word for word. 

See, Beautiful Wife, I’m not crazy.  (P.S. AR-15 makes a great birthday present, too.)  Our friends think that and thought we were worthy to be warned.  Not that he was surprised when I mentioned we are getting prepped. 

I got to see his fine gun collection. (It’s hard to justify weapon purchases with the wife. But she is getting a better idea of how important they are, and she knows she needs to learn how to use them.)  He has some prepping done, but they are looking to move in the next few months to years further north, out of the valley.  With their two year old.  I think the wife was more surprised to see her friend has a handgun in her purse at all times for protection.  She never would have guessed.  When I built the house, I overbuilt a lot of the systems.  One is the water line, and the other is septic tank.  We have 2 bedrooms, but the tank and leach field are designed for 8-10 people.  It was a few dollars more and makes sense.  I think I may offer our friends the extra room and/or loft if SHTF.  Their preps overlap ours, and where they fall short (water, sewer, gardening) we have extra, and where we fall short (manpower, weapons), they have extra.  I will have to talk to the Wife about this, but I think it would be much better than us just being alone when it all goes down. 

Went to work while the stock market tanked on Monday.  Mentioned Tuesday to the surveyor that he needed to stock up on gold.  He said he has bullets.  Lots of them.  And he went shopping yesterday and stocked up on food.  Six months, I asked.  He got 3 years’ worth of food and cases of MRE’s.  He said (and I hope he’s joking) when it all goes down, he’s poisoning his chickens because he knows they’ll be stolen and he’s got a cannon that has a 3 mile range. 

In a matter of 4 days, I discovered 2 friends that are bigger preppers than me.  It’s like the old saying that if you find a couple needles in a haystack, then that thing must be stuffed with needles.  If that is the case, I’m beginning to feel a lot better living in the boonies, even if my neighbors are the crazy ones.

Can i Quit Now?

I love how the Beautiful Wife can put a smile on my face at lunch today:

BW:  You look like something’s bothering you.

Me:  Dow’s down 600 points and it’s starting to look worse.

<long pause>

BW:  Does this mean I can quit my job now?  I would rather stay home than be here when the rioting starts.

Me:  I doubt half the sheeple here can spell Dow Jones.

She’s gotten wise to what may happen.  I think she’s just tired of working and being grossly underpaid, but there is no way for her to get paid what she’s worth.  I got a good laugh out of it.  

Asian Markets Open...

Asian Markets Open.

Gold spikes $44/oz.

Never in my life have I been so worried about the sun coming up tomorrow.

But I have faith it will.

What do we do now?

What do we do now?  The sharks smell the blood in the water.  The stock market has been dropping like a lead turd for a while now, and people are starting to realize the debt ceiling debacle from earlier this week does nothing for anybody, except for the President.  He gets a blank check to keep spending until 2012... if there is a government still by then.

I used to read Fox News and then read some of the comments.  I would get mad at the Democrats for their starry eyed approach at everything.  They would love to claim to be tolerant of everything, well, everything but those damn Republicans and “teabaggers.”  Those people could rot in hell as far as they were concerned. 

Now I’m mad at both sides.  Both spent their time screaming and fighting, acting like we wanted them to for our side.  Everybody had a plan, no one could agree, and the President looked like the tired mom walking through the mall while the two kids fought over who got to ride in the front seat on the way home.

So what did we accomplish?  Nothing.  It’s all the usual smoke and mirrors.  Sure, it’s X many trillions of dollars over a decade, but really it’s nothing.  In my mind, it’s the equivalent to cutting $1,000 a month in our family’s budget by saying I won’t buy a new car in 6 years, and I promise not to start smoking cigarettes in the future (I don’t smoke now).  Oh, and for real cuts right now, I plan to shop at the Safeway instead of the City Market, saving me 2 miles of driving and 3 cents of gas.  Now that is real savings we can bank on.

Now I know the moonbat urbanist Democrats are all salivating at the change to raise taxes for the rich.  My boss is rich, and he employs me.  Times are tough here in the valley for engineering work.  He keeps me here only because I’ll be getting that coveted P.E. license in 2 years, and he wants to retire.  Other than that, I’m destined to be an unemployed gardener at my house.   If they raise his taxes, he’ll have to cut me to make ends meet.  He understands this, and I understand this.  The Democrats don’t.  They see more money to give to me when I assimilate into the sheeple fold, because all people on unemployment must be Democrats.

The many, many moons of living in south Louisiana taught me to prep for hurricane season.  I still check the National Hurricane Center’s website daily to see what is going on out there.  I would have my preps done for a storm and check the NHC predictions, then check what the state was doing for evacuations.  I always sheltered in place.  But I enjoyed watching the sheeple that went nuts the days and hours before buying up beer and smokes.  This time, it’s the DJIA I’m watching, and the spot price of gold.  But no one around and no one in the media is mentioning it.  It’s downright scary.  But at least when it comes, I can tell my wife “I told you so.” 

Wheat field coming in

Since the Beautiful Wife asked if we could grow wheat, I have been working on getting a plot of land near the house, in the "new" garden area, to accommodate a small field of winter wheat.  The soil here is mostly a sandy loam, with chico and greasewood as the predominate plants (you can see them in almost all of my pictures.  They stretch for miles and miles)

This picture shows the start of the project.  As you can see, I started by throwing the muck from the barn onto the top of the hardpan soil.  This will keep the soil moist when I start to water it.  Usually, the water just evaporates off, or soaks the first inch and then no further.  And it adds nutrients to the soil when I plow it under.

Another view, showing the rest of the field.  After mucking the barn, I had only enough muck to cover 2/3 of the field.  Next week, I hope to have most of the covered field tilled and will be able to finish throwing muck on the field.  Keeping it wet is important, and I have been outside, watering the hay, at least once every hour until I can till it under.

Even after soaking the field several times, the water only penetrates about 4 inches.  This makes the first 4 inches a pleasure to dig in, but after that, it's almost like concrete.  To help it along, I drive my shovel in as far as I can to make an opening, then soak the field.  From the picture above, you can see the shovel marks on a patch of field.

After a hot afternoon, this is all I've done.  It takes a long time to work my way across.  I water the field every morning in the hopes that the water will penetrate and stay in that first foot of soil.  We finally put some fence posts in to surround the entire garden and discovered that the groundwater level right now is only 4 feet below the ground.  Good news if I decide to put a sand point well in the new greenhouse.  

Update on the Garden

Here are some pictures I have been hording of the garden.  It's been growing like crazy over the last few months, mainly because it gets watered twice a day.  However, over the last week or so, we have been getting rain every day.  That in itself doesn't say much, except out here 6 inches of rain a year is a lot.  Just one reason I miss the wet south.  

This is the first egg I found out there.  I'm so proud of my chickens and my ability to not kill them.  I have five hens that I got from the feed store before Easter and I am getting one good size egg every afternoon now.  I am hoping to get more chickens this fall, move them to a larger coop and give the eggs I don't need to my neighbor that has dairy goats.

Don't remember planting sunflowers in my garden.  But they are really taking off.  I am hoping to plant many more next spring and build a press to extract the oil.  This would come in handy post-SHTF for fried chicken.  I don't know what is growing behind the sunflower, but the neighbor mentioned that some of it is oats.  My problem is that I didn't compost the droppings and debris off the bottom of the goat barn before I planted my garden.  I just tilled and tilled and watered it until I got a nice layer of mush.  The soil here is very alkaline and sand, so nothing grows out here except greasewood and a few desert grasses.  Tilling in the hay and poop helped the soil, but allowed for whatever grains the goats didn't digest to sprout.  Not that I am complaining, just an observation. Next year will have a better composting program on site to fix this problem. 

Inside the small chicken coop.  It's about 4 feet deep and well used.  You can see the egg in the background. I had to get a garden rake to reach in to get the darn egg.  I have nesting boxes, but the girls like to watch me suffer.  I'm hoping to have a much bigger coop for them real soon and I might take out this coop.  Beautiful Wife hates that the coop is "attached" to the house, but c'est la vie, she gets used to it.  Keeps me outside so she can have some "her time" away from me.