Liz should be getting here tomorrow evening sometime. I’ve been missing her even with the video chatting at night, not to mention I’m starting to get a little lonely. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could go into town, but the truck is stuck in the mud. I was hoping that would be over by now, but the gravel people still haven’t come and the truck is only 2-wheel drive. I spent 45 minutes getting it out earlier, moved 10 feet and got stuck again so I decided to just wait for the ground to dry out.
The truck itself is really nice. I can’t thank my step-dad Gary enough for trading with me. I’ve got a list of things I need to get with it and the trailer, but it’ll have to wait at least until tomorrow, maybe the next day even. My life has never revolved so much around the weather before, and although it can be a little frustrating, it seems natural and right.
For instance, I knew it was going to rain for a couple days so I threw out some cover crop in the area where the garden will be. Mainly I put the cover crop seed down where I didn’t think we get to making garden beds this year. I went out there today and I could already clearly see the stuff shooting up. Pretty impressive, especially since there are quite a few native grasses, herbs, and flowers already taking over. I’m still a little concerned that the cover crop won’t be able to compete, but we’ll see.
I had planned on going into town and picking up a bunch of pallets and stuff for the composting toilet today, but the truck was still stuck. So instead I did what I could on the composting toilet, which wasn’t too bad. I sunk the remaining 3 cedar posts and got the pallet which will be the sub-floor raised, leveled, and nailed in. I also stripped the cedar bark off the posts, which I probably should have done before hand, but it didn’t seem to want to come off then. Once I finally got it going it was like pulling string cheese apart.
I’m pretty proud of the little stand I’ve got so far. It’s sturdy and I think it looks nice. I’m going to try to find some sort of recycled wood to make the walls out of, but I’m going to buy some more plywood to make the actual toilet part out of. We’re gonna be pooping in style in no time.
The other thing I did today was take down a couple trees out in the garden area that needed to come out because they were seriously blocking southern exposure. I also widened the access way so that a truck can get back in there now, although it’ll need some gravel on it too.
There’s a ton of brush everywhere, big piles of it along the driveway, in the garden, and on the building site. It’s really a 2-person task making mulch. It would really help to have one person preparing the wood so that it would fit into the chipper and the other person feeding it in. There’s a lot of it that needs to be done, and I don’t think we’ll need to mulch all of it. There’s a good bit that’s too big to be mulched and too crooked or small to be used for anything else so we’ll have a good ol’ fashioned bonfire here at some point. Although I do plan on leaving a few small piles of brush here and there as wildlife habitat, especially around the garden.
Things are definitely taking longer than I expected, even with anticipating that it would take longer than I expected. We’re probably not going to really get started on the straw bale building until the middle of May. That’ll be alright though, we should have a nice base camp by then and that still gives a month of flex time on the construction.