Hello Everyone!

A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.

***TL;DR:*** **There is no ***tl;dr*** because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.**
<center>[End Introduction]</center>

# <center>Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 12!</center>

**An Indoor Stove, A Hidden Nest, Good Girl Steals An Egg, Solo Hiking, Turkey Tailed Old Oaks & Superb Biochar**

I slept in this morning until a little after six which is much later than when I have been waking up of late but is probably still early enough in the day to get some writing done before the sun rises fully. Doing all this writing in the morning has been rather nice especially when I have long hours before dawn to get it done because then I do not feel like I need to hurry so that I am not wasting those precious daylight hours that I need for working on projects outdoors. It is assuredly a tricky balance in the mornings to get everything worded out because I have to replay the events of the day before in my mind and often tickle my memory into cooperating in such a way that I can recall the timeline of said events which can be quite difficult if I find myself having done a bunch of different things the day before.

Since the morning was rather rainy I spent a good portion of it sorting things out better in the storage tent, moving some stuff from the storage tent to the camping tent and putting my mattress (that was in the storage tent) between the mattress and box-spring that I have been using in the camping tent. The mattress shuffling was mainly to get he mattress out of the storage tent because it was taking up too much room and making finding/retrieving stuff from in there rather difficult with how it was basically just in the damned way no matter how I moved it around in the storage tent. I dunno if I mentioned it previously but the landowners here gave me a new mattress to sleep on because one box-spring and mattress set of mine had been retired to act as 'decks' to pile a bunch of my stuff on in the storage tent to keep it all from resting directly on the ground. The new mattress is much thicker than my old one so now with two mattresses and one box-spring in the camping tent the bed is nearly a meter high which is fine and all but it does not make a perfect seat at my writing table like it did with my old combination of mattresses and a box-spring. I am now sitting almost even with my writing table's top which is a bit awkward for writing at but I will undoubtedly somehow manage.

Once I got done shuffling stuff in the tents around I spent some time moving my outdoor stove setup into the front of the storage tent which was a bit tricky because the ground in the tent where I placed it is uneven and it was the only space inside the tent that putting the stove was possible unless I wanted to shuffle everything in there around to make room for it elsewhere. Eventually I used some crates, blocks of wood and shims to get everything level and plumb and then I put a big battery and some other heavy items on the bottom shelf (of the temporary stand that I am using to set the stove on) just to weight it all down and help keep it from tipping over. It was a hacky solution but worked out rather well and probably not quite as dodgy as me wording it out makes it sound. Honestly I am just happy that for the first time in well over a year that I have a stove setup that is in an enclosed and weatherproof area which is going to make brewing my morning espresso when it is cold and rainy much less of an aggravating experience. The only real downside is that the stove being in the storage tent will probably attract the rodents but I am thinking to use the shelves (which are part of the temporary stand) to place mouse (and/or rat) traps on which is what got me to thinking about putting the stove in there in the first place. Aside from that and the weather the chickens kept jumping on the outdoor stove when it was outside and I just couldn't stand the idea of them doing that because I do after all brew my espresso and cook on the stove!

During the process of getting the stove moved into the storage tent I was shuffling around my propane tanks (so that I could use the crates some of them were in on the stove moving project) and I noticed that at the base of a tree near one of the tanks that there was a small depression in the ground with three chicken eggs in it. I have no idea how long this 'hidden nest' has been there but I guess that during the day the hens (or just one of the hens) have been laying eggs there. I decided to just leave the eggs alone and see what happens because either the hens will keep laying more there or the dogs will eventually find them and eat them. It was kind of funny but just before I found the 'hidden nest' my big dog had snuck into the temporary chicken coop (while all the chickens were outside roaming around) and stole the one egg that was in there that had gotten laid the day after the first egg that I found in there and I had just left it in there hoping that they would lay more. Anyway, I saw the dog slinking off behind the camping tent looking rather guilty and carrying something in her mouth and when I went to investigate I saw that it was the egg from the coop. I swear she looked at me, set the egg down on the ground, looked at me, looked at the egg, looked at me again and when I shrugged then said something like 'go ahead and eat it' and she wagged her tail happily and began gently gnawing on the egg to break it open so that she could eat it!

After I got done with all the stuff around the base camp I went for another long hike around the property where I mainly just tried to learn the lay of the land better as well as a couple of the property lines. I opted to not take the dogs with me because I would be walking near a public road and near other folks properties. As much as I also looked for stuff in the ground (like that steel cable that I found last week) I also took the time to inspect some of the larger trees here and wow there are some really beautiful old oaks here that were not cut down the last time that the place was logged for timber. Those kinds of oak trees are so majestic and beautiful and I saw signs of a lot of wildlife in and around them as well as plenty of good firewood below them where they have been shedding their dead branches for what is probably the better part of a hundred years now. I also noticed that there were a lot of shelf-type mushrooms growing on the fallen branches and one of them I think is 'Turkey Tail' and although I have not verified that yet one way or another there sure are a heck of a lot of them and it would amount to the most Turkey Tails that I have ever seen growing in the woods. I took some pictures of one particular tree branch that was covered with them but no matter what angle that I took the picture from I could not fit them all in the frame!

On a different note, the first thing that I noticed when I made it over to start working at the shelter site was that I had made quite the mess while working the big fire the day before and there was small sticks and vines strewn everywhere between where the brush piles that I had burned were and the fire-pit itself. I also found lots of small sections of vine that were still rooted in the ground around the site and although I had somehow kept from tripping over them I figured that it was best to just go over the entire cleared area and remove as many of them as I could find. The area is covered in a rather dense matting of leaves so seeing the vines that often grow for several feet across the surface of the ground before then growing up something is a tricky prospect and often requires the use of a garden rake to locate them. The strangler vines that I find like that I have been pulling up by the roots but the grape vines (that I want to grow back) I have been cutting off just below the surface of the ground's leaf matting. With how much sun and water the area gets I think that with some small trellises that the grapes will grow rather well all over the new shelter site which is pretty damned cool in my opinion especially considering just how well established they already are in the area.

Anyway, I wound up raking up much of the site and after cleaning out the fire-pit (and mounding all the bio-char around the rim of the pit) I started once again burning off some of the brush around the site and making more ashes and low-grade bio-char. With all the water that I previously extinguished the fire with and the rainfall there was not actually many ashes left in the pit but whoa was there a heck of a lot of bio-char! There was also still a bunch of fat lighter that had gotten smothered out so I wound up using it to start a new fire and recreate that hot 'heart of the fire' (to dry the green vegetation and wet leaves out) that I described the other day. I did not make the new fire super large or anything but I wound up filling the pit with more ashes and bio-char again and while it was all burning it was nice and warm and radiated that warmth quite well. I dunno if it is the types of wood that I have been burning or the placement/size of the pit... or what but the bio-char that I have been producing has been abundant in volume and visually looks like a higher quality bio-char than what I have produced in the past at other sites with different types of burnable material.

Later in the day I setup some dunnage at the new shelter site so that when one of the landowners brought out some fence posts (for the new dog yard) that we could stage them on it. I did not get too fancy with the dunnage and just used some of the firewood that I cut to both lay the posts on and act as stakes to keep the stack of posts from being able to roll downhill. We staged the posts beside where I have all those smaller poles stored that I collected while clearing the site which will make them easily accessible when I start digging holes for them and have to carry them downhill to be installed. It really is a convenient setup for the fence construction and aside from having to dig through a layer of really dense clay at about a foot down which I discovered whilst digging that fire-pit a few days ago... I think that the fence installation will go rather smoothly. There is the option of renting a gas powered auger but I am hoping that with all the recent rain (and the ground being saturated) that I can dig the two foot holes manually and not have to rely on machinery to do it. We will see how all that goes but one way or another I am going to dig a few holes today and see how things go from there.

Well, it is now a little after eight in the morning and I will need to just wrap this up because it will still take me another hour to get everything edited and posted. It is super windy outside currently so there is no rush this morning for me to 'get outdoors' and start working because with all the trees here and amount of potential dead-fall... I just feel safer staying in the tent until the wind dies down or at least stops gusting. I was hoping to burn more debris today but I think that instead I will wait until another day to do that and instead just focus on digging holes and installing fence posts for the new dog yard.

The world is apparently at a peculiar juncture but for the first time in a really long time I feel like things are going wonderfully with my endeavors and although it could just be 'new location mania' going on... I think that my overall progress so far sort of attests to just how 'into' this entire endeavor that I really am and along the way I do not feel any strife, struggle or real resistance to getting projects accomplished in a timely manner and done at an even pace so that is pretty nice because I find it to be a very relaxing 'modus operandi' where I get to actually enjoy the process of doing stuff and the 'end result' is a mere eventuality. Like the saying goes "It is all good in the woods" and with that I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

<center>![IMG_20201129_134830.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/jacobpeacock/Z3VkSduw-IMG_20201129_134830.jpg)</center>
<center>*The Hidden Nest!*</center>

<center>![IMG_20201129_121851.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/jacobpeacock/HnMbZ42U-IMG_20201129_121851.jpg)</center>
<center>*Maybe Turkey Tail Mushrooms!*</center>

<center>
![IMG_20201129_113923.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/jacobpeacock/wGmmP9El-IMG_20201129_113923.jpg)</center>
<center>*I have found lots of these Jolly Rolls here!*</center>

<center>**Thanks for reading!**</center>

**More about me:** I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.

Nearly four years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!

The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.

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