Storage and organization on a real budget

© 2012 Joshua Stark

Last year, for some godforsaken reason, we finally succumbed to our media overlords and purchased cable TV.  In our defense, it made internet access much cheaper and gave us a land-line.  Plus, we bought the cheapest deal, the "family package", in which we discovered that families don't watch sports or news (you know, like the kind that basic cable gets you), those being too fru-fru, I suppose.  There is probably a gem about the economic well-being of American families in there, somewhere; I'm just too tired to mine for it right now.

Anyhoo, I must admit that I have become hopelessly addicted to the DIY Network channel, with its interesting shows, its upbeat personalities, its 'go get 'em, Tiger!' attitude.  Even its commercial breaks tend to be entertaining, containing little tips on how to lay a floor, build an addition, put in crown moulding, etc.  The danger of the Do-It-Yourself channel is that it starts to convince you that you can, in fact, do it yourself.  However, there are some pitfalls, especially for a person who can only afford cable that doesn't even give him CNN.

It's the little things that get to me, like how to save ten grand on your kitchen upgrade (if my kitchen upgrade saved ten grand, it would leave me about $9,950 richer than I am now).  Or the army of helpers, power tools, and expertise each show comes equipped with.  If I had a radial-arm saw, a four hundred horsepower compressor, nail guns and a table saw with a cavalry's-worth of sawhorses, I honestly believe I could do it myself.  But, as I am reluctant even to purchase the 4x8 plywood for the lazy susan spinning shelf, my abilities are a tad constrained.  (In its defense, DIY Network has a show called "Renovation Realities", where they basically pick on people who don't have bottomless tool sheds and scores of minions... but, at least it is reality TV that shows reality.)

I do have a ($75) bandsaw and some rotary tool stuff.  I even have a circular saw.  And I have various wood-removing hand tools (scraper, teeny handplane, dentally-challenged Japanese pull-saw, tiny Marples saw*).  Of course, most of my tools have a beautiful, light, even layer of rust on their flat parts, a result of the seive-like roof of Castle Rattington, the storage shed.  I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of sawing down a palm tree with a Japanese pullsaw, but let me tell you that it's even more fun when the sawblade is missing a few teeth and looks like it was stored in a collander in a tidal zone.

I'd been overwhelmed by the notion of tackling that storage shed for a couple of years, and it wasn't until I tore out every hidey-hole for furred vermin that I realized I had a diamond-in-the-rough.  It's big enough (say, 14'x7'), and after removing the weird shelving from a previous owner, I felt like I had something to work with.  I knuckled under and bought a sheet of pegboard, hung a bunch of tools, and suddenly the place actually felt useful.  What I needed was more organizing storage... which, if one were completely seduced by the DIY channel and various interesting sites on the internet, would require more purchases.

Shaking my head to remove the consumerist fog, I looked around at what I already had:  An old duck-and-dog house that, for emotional reasons, I still can't touch; a few cedar fenceboards that I'd purchased when I realized how useful and cheap they are; various hinges and such from previous unfinished projects; a pile of wood boxes I'd acquired via craigslist's free site (another addiction that doesn't cost a thing, except perhaps the emotional state of one's spouse).  I cut a couple of boxes to size, attached them to a piece of cedar fenceboard, and now I've got a nifty little container for the rotary tool drill press.  I plan to mount it to the bottom of of a cedar fenceboard shelf, and build a cedar fenceboard spinning shelf atop it for the rotary tool bits and pieces. 

I just may have the nicest-smelling workshop in town.

...did I mention that the boxes were free?

 *Why did I buy a bunch of tiny tools?  Because I needed/wanted woodworking tools at one time, and in the store, the tiny versions are about twenty bucks cheaper... for good reason.  Advice for a future me:  just buy the danged router and regular tools, and don't think that tiny tools can do anything other than make tiny things.

Microclimates

© 2011 Joshua Stark

You may have noticed that I've put up a list of what's in season right now for foraging, hunting and fishing.  Homesteaders should most definitely understand their local conditions and learn to recognize the bounty of their region's wild plants, fish and game.  This list is a general description, information I'm gathering from friends and the news.  Your neighborhood, I can almost guarantee, is going to be slightly different from the list. 

One reason for this difference is microclimates: ecological niches that so dramatically shift light patterns, temperatures, humidity, etc., that they effectively create climatic conditions different from the surrounding area.  In California, microclimates can be extreme (due to the wildly varying topography, ocean influences, and other factors), but for practical purposes, a microclimate can be as small as the length of a wall.

More intensive gardening, especially in small spaces, can be greatly enhanced by understanding light and shadow patterns and windbreaks on your property, and matching plants and watering regimens to these patterns, rather than relying on the general assumptions of seed company descriptions.  And this eye toward recognizing the influences of geography, direction, wind, and moisture can also help your local foraging efforts. 

Recognizing niches that vary growing conditions in your neighborhood may lead to pleasant surprises, usually by extending "shoulder" seasons - the weeks on either end of a particular plant's harvest time.  Greens, berries, and root veggies are all especially affected by microclimates because they tend to be low-growing and hardy plants, able to survive in wildly varying conditions (the same characteristics that also make them pests, at times). 

If it is at all helpful to you, come back from time to time and see what is in season, or will be, soon.  Definitely use the list while keeping an eye out in your own neck of the woods, especially during the shoulder seasons.  You may find a treat.

A different kind of harvest

© 2010 Joshua Stark

Since I moved my 'Lands on the Margin' concept over here to Agrarianista, I feel more free to talk about my other passions, my outdoor life.  As I've said, California is blessed with a huge variety of climates and conditions, from which has arisen a vast diversity of plant life.  It has also, therefore, been blessed with a vast diversity of animal life, which, though greatly impacted by urban sprawl and industrial agriculture, it still provides in abundance.

Ever since I can remember, I've been fascinated by animal life.  As a kid, we used to always play "animal", pretending to be one or another sort of creature (almost always ending, by the way, in one of us being a badger or a wolverine, those symbols of the utter wild in the West).  I also birdwatched, and we took a spotlight out on the 'back roads' looking for nighttime creatures.  I've had a deep and intimate relationship with one Olaus Murie, but until about 6 years ago, I had no idea he was a founding father of the environmental movement - to me, he (along with my Dad) was the man who taught me how to track.  I fished, too.  And, I hunted.

I didn't know just how big an impact hunting would have on my life when I was a child.  I was just attracted to it the same way a cat has to get that little string you jiggle in front of her.  With my friends, I hunted from the day I got my first BB gun.  When I got older, I thought about the ethics of hunting and death, and I decided that not only was it okay to hunt, to me it was actually morally preferable to other ways of living (if you are interested in my ethical philosophy, take a look at my other active blog, "Ethics and the Environment").

Today, much of my professional life and my personal choices are due to my outdoor experiences.  And California has blessed me with an abundance of outdoor choices, from kayaking and birdwatching, to telemark, mountain climbing (should I so choose to try these things), hunting and fishing. 

More generally, hunting and fishing are grand traditions in a homesteading, agrarian life, and I see no reason why living inside city limits should change that.  Within 30 minutes of my door, I can hunt anything from rabbits and doves to deer.  Oftentimes, in places like California, foraging, hunting, and fishing actually can provide quite a consistent meal, more efficiently turning the local Sun, water and soil into something to sustain us.  In fact, in light of the constraints on animal husbandry that city life brings, hunting and fishing may be the only ways to directly acquire meat.

And so it is Fall here in California (regardless of the high today of 75 degrees), and that means hunting seasons.  Expect some conversations to follow about game, should some of my hunting friends get lucky enough to want to share...

If you have any questions or comments about hunting and how it might fit into urban homesteading and urban agrarianism, please let me know!

If you are a waterfowl hunter, click on this image to be given the shakes.

Changes (resisting stealing from David Bowie)

© 2010 Joshua Stark

Though I love Bowie, I just couldn't bring myself to title my post what it was screaming to be titled.

Anyhoo, I want to point out some changes I've made to this blog, and some changes to my blogging, in general.

First, notice that you can subscribe to my blog, so if you are comfortable with that sort of thing, go right ahead and sign up.

Next, although I'm going to keep it on my blog roll for awhile (so people may still access old content), I'm actually not going to post to my 'Lands on the Margin' blog separate from this one.  Now, I love that blog, and it's difficult to stop posting, but as a good friend suggested, I can easily roll posts about marginal lands into Agrarianista here, especially considering what I've come to realize about urban homesteading in California.

In California, we have a long, distinguished history of effective foraging, hunting and fishing.  We have more plant varieties than all other states in the U.S. combined.  We have a fairly close proximity to a huge variety of climates and microclimates, and the elevation changes (here around Sacramento, we are less than three hours from coast to alpine climates) provide a gigantic range of seasons (we pick elderberries from June through September).  Historically, as Brian Fagan points out in his book, "Before California", for 12,000 years our region had no need for agriculture, and by the time the first Europeans arrived,  California housed ~350k, all from foraging, hunting and fishing (including ~ 60K tons of acorns per year).

With the arrival of us Europeans came other forage-able species:  Blackberries, mustard, fennel, and many roadside weeds and ornamentals (like rosemary), often highly prized in culinary circles, are had by simply sloughing off one's pride and stopping at the abandoned lot with a paper bag and a knife. 

So for me, urban homesteading in California definitely involves a lot of foraging.  Besides, I know the edgelands better than I know how to coax squash out of my backyard soil, and I'm able to trade, from time to time, for those wonderful cup-&-saucers and other squashes we love.  The trade of things one has made, including one's store of knowledge, for others' well-wrought expertise, is the cornerstone of homesteading; it builds the community people realize they crave when they find it. 

Soon, I'll also set up some stand-alone pages:  "How to start homesteading"; and compilations (w/ additional materials) of two occasional series from my 'Lands' blog, "Edible and Useful Plants of California's Edgelands", and "Marginal Reviews:  Gear for California's Edgelands".

"River Nature Tours" (already up), is a page on my guiding service around Central California.  If you are interested in getting an up-close look at our local river habitats, please check it out and shoot me an email.  Soon, I will post information on an upcoming weekend getaway on the Sacramento Delta, with guided trips for birdwatching, learning some basic California edgeland foraging (there's more than just stuff to eat, too!), and some local flavors, both literal and figurative.

For those of you who have found some interest or entertainment here, please pass along my blog to people you think may be interested.  Also, please feel free to comment with tips, questions, suggestions, disagreements...  I'm very interested in hearing which have been helpful, what you might like to read, and the expertise you have for me and others who are also interested in urban agrarianism.

Multitasking, & an urban homesteading review of the Earthwise 20" lawnmower

© 2010 Joshua Stark

"The only unitasker allowed in my kitchen is the fire extinguisher."  -Alton Brown

I really like Alton Brown, even if only for hosting "Iron Chef: America", and showing me how to turn steel-cut oats from a good-breakfast-but-not-worth-the-time (sorry, foodies) into a delicious and hearty meal.  His own show, Good Eats, is a wonderful surprise when we stumble upon it at my parents' house (we don't get cable), and his philosophy about cooking, I think, appeals to the urban homesteader:  He finds inexpensive ways for creating really special meals, at times using very inventive methods, and he requires that his equipment multitask.  For example, his box-fan jerky drying concept was simply genius, and I can't wait to use his idea for a $50 ceramic smoker. 
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 I learned a good lesson about power equipment and multitasking this past year.

When we first bought our little slice of paradise, we also bought a push-reel mower.  A Scott 18" mower, it did a great job on our little lawn.  But after a year of good work cutting grass, we realized we had other issues to deal with on our property, issues that couldn't be handled by a push-reel.

First, we have huge trees - a redwood, a cedar, and a walnut, the smallest of which is over 60 feet, and the tallest now approaching 100 - and these trees produce a lot of duff.  Our neighbor also has a 60+ ft. walnut, and we catch a ton of his leaves, too.

Second, with ducks, we have flies.  Our ducks roam around in our back yard, and wherever they poop, the flies are born (otherwise, duck poop is pretty innocuous, and also a great grass fertilizer).  I wondered how I might suck up some of the mag... ma... fly babies.

Third, we buy straw bales for the ducks' house, and when they are finished with it, we use the straw for compost.  However, the straw is long and coarse, and takes quite a while to break down.  I looked for some device to chop or shred the straw, and found only industrial-strength equipment at exorbitant prices.  I wondered what I could get cheaper, that has fast spinning blades?

Then it struck me:  A power lawnmower!  Being environmentally conscious-ish, we'd just bought a push-reel.  However, a push-reel does one thing really well, and we needed to make our assets sweat, (to make benign a terrible, terrible phrase).  I hoped an electric lawnmower would have the power and capability to do three jobs well enough:  Cut grass, chop straw, and suck up mag... ma... fly babies.

After completing the requisite google search for electric mower reviews, and looking at the good and not-so-good hardware stores, we settled on an EarthWise 20" mower, purchased from OSH.  The Earthwise mower comes in a smaller size, too (18"), but OSH had only the twenty-inch model.  They also happened to have a sale at the time that made it quite the steal.

This mower has a couple of features I find helpful, but it isn't a gadget-laden doohickey.  It mows one speed, and it's corded, so make sure you've got enough extension cord to cover your lawn.

The features relate to how the grass gets cut, and the lawnmower gives you three options:  A grass catcher, a side "mulch" (basically, a side exit for grass, with no catcher), or a mulch box (which comes only with the 20" Earthwise mower).  In place of the grasscatcher bag, the box fits into the opening where the grass would come out, and it forces the grass (or straw) to be re-cut and re-cut by the blade, instead of being ejected from under the mower.

So far, the mower has surpassed expectations.  It cuts grass well and cleanly, and sucks up duff (sticks, leaves, needles) just as well as a blower would push it, but without the obnoxious odor and sound.  But the big test it has passed is its ability to "mulch" straw, which it does well with the mulch box attachment.

I line up the used straw in a pile about six inches high and maybe 10-12 feet long, I install the mulching box on the mower, and I slowly make my way over the straw.  The lawnmower turns it into a duck-poop-enriched, more easily compostable material for our raised beds, and kills any mag... ma... fly babies in the straw. 

I haven't had a chance to see if it helps keep down the fly population from the lawn, because we accidentally replaced much of the lawn with hard-packed dirt this year (when we dug the pond), but I'm confident the theory is sound.  In the meantime, I'm tickled pink with the performance of this lawnmower, and recommend it to all you urban homesteaders out there. 

My multitasking lesson learned, I turned to other possibilities.  How can I hull some walnuts without having to spend $500 on a huller?  Well, I have an electric drill, and buckets cost four bucks... look for that one pretty soon. 

NOTE:  I received no freebies, and there is no advertising sales to me for any of the links in this post.  I just like the lawnmower.