I’m changing the nature of this blog. I (we—Shelter Publications) are going to focus on building,
carpentry, homes, gardening, and the like on our brand-new — ta-daa:

https://www.theshelterblog.com

   It’s been up for a couple of months now, and
its look and function have been steadily improved by Mac Wizard Rick Gordon.
Evan’s doing most of the posting (I’m funneling my posts through him), Lew is
starting at 3 posts a week, and we’re encouraging builders to send us photos
and descriptions of their latest creations.

   We hope to build this up so it’s a player in
digiworld —we’re aiming for some major readership. We don’t think there is any
blog or website out there with the type content we are generating. Think of all
the buildings and builders in our books—now coming out daily.store appearances (a slide show and book signing
for Tiny Homes on the Move), and getting such good vibes. It feels like
we’re a tribe. We’re interested in the same things—doing stuff for ourselves
(as much as possible), having a warm, attractive, natural-as-possible
handcrafted home, growing some of our own food…

   Remember, it’s “theshelterblog,” not “shelterblog.” The “the” is necessary to get to the right
place. This blog—my own—will continue to follow my
idiosyncratic path through life. Wherever I go, I’m taking you, the reader,
along with me, riding shotgun. It gives me an extra incentive to explore, to
search, to inquire, to shoot photos—if I can come back and tell others about
it.

“…When clearing an old overgrown pasture, thick with alder and cherry saplings, we were left with piles of round wood.  Instead of burning them in a slash pile or as firewood, we took the straightest logs and built a round-pole goat barn, and ultimately an addition on that barn.  No building text would ever recommend building with structural alder, but that goat barn still stands, ten years later, and it cost virtually nothing to build, save for the cost of screws, reclaimed siding, free recycled roofing, and old windows and doors.…”

From homestead-honey.com here.

A great site by and for homesteaders

Tom Stegall at the Stegall Mill in Marshville, NC. When I asked if I could take a photo of him, he said, “Are you going to send it to Obama?”

  He gave me directions to his farm and I went out and looked at his barn. He raises these gourds and puts 45 of them up on poles for as nests for the Martins, which he says come in the Spring and stay until July. (They perform aerial acrobatics while catching flying insects.)

   He gave me a recipe for cooking a possum (with sweet potatoes).

“Interesting article:

‘I wanted to physically make the world a better place,’ Janes said. With his family’s help, he bought 40 acres of forested land on Denman Island. It came with two trailers. Janes and a girlfriend he’s no longer with moved into one, and promptly sold the other — ‘a big, ugly, white vinyl doublewide,’ he said. They planted a vegetable garden and got some chickens. Self-sufficiency ‘was definitely an ideal,’ Janes explained, ‘but we were doing everything we could’ to achieve it.

-Mike W”

Click here.

I realized in the ”60s and 70s that self-sufficiency is a DIRECTION. You never will get there, even remotely. In those years we were raising a lot of our own food, and when I planted some wheat and went through all the steps to get it from the field to flour for bread (unlike potatoes or corn, which you eat just the way it comes out of the ground), I saw that self sufficiency is a myth. BUT that’s no reason to give up. The idea is to become as self-sufficient as possible. AND, we weren’t really doing it to make the world a better place. We did it because whatever we could produce was better and cheaper and more tuned in than what we could buy.  Like building one’s own house. AND in doing that, it turns out that it IS better for the world.

-LK

Organic growers have been saying this for years. One grower told me (somewhat facetiously) years ago, “People are smoking Paraquat.” Now the scientists are catching up. Lesson here: know your grower.

“…On the pesticide issue, Raber said it’s important to remember that smoking a marijuana bud that’s been sprayed with chemicals is far different than eating a non-organic tomato. First and foremost, he said, there are no controls over what’s sprayed on marijuana crops. And, while most people would rinse off a tomato before eating it, they can’t wash a bud before putting it in their pipe. The body also has filters in place for things that are ingested, he said, but not for what’s inhaled.

   ‘You don’t have the first pass metabolism of the liver,” he said. “You don’t have the lack of absorptivity going through the stomach or the gut lining. It’s a very different equation when you’re inhaling.’

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