Category Archives: Homesteading

Anything and everything that has to deal with living on the land – critters, 4 leggeds, flowers, gardens, canning, off-grid, solar, building our house, and making a home.

Finally a new ride and spring delights

1995 Toyota 4Runner SR5 4×4, V6, manual – fully loaded and exceptionally clean in and out!! Wheeee… finally independence from sharing Russel’s work truck. I have been without a vehicle for 5 years. The 1971 VW bus runs, but doesn’t do the roads to our homestead well. So it became a town only ride and a rolling closet 🙂
I am really excited about this. Having my own vehicle that will take me where I want to go will really free me up.

Spring has come very early and very hot..80 degrees the last few days. We need more rain, but I am enjoying the nice weather too. Maybe we will have peaches this year!

I could tell you more boring homesteading stuff… like getting the pressure tank in line with the pressure pump so we will stop blowing out the pressure switch in the pump…stuff like that, there’s just days full of that sort of thing.

Living in the hills .. it’s like living in a wildlife refuge. I love it.

Early Spring ’05

We have had beautiful (60-70’s) and sunny weather most of the last month. Not necessarily a good thing, but lovely just the same.
No real news.. just working on getting more settled at the land. It’s a long and rough road.

We do live in a beautiful paradise.

Quite a big woodpecker is tearing up our log!

This was taken through the kitchen window…I adjusted contrast a bit much.

Home Interior Shots

Here are a few small pics of the interior of the house. You can easily see that it is totally not-finished, or for that matter really started, except for the paint and the absolute necessities of living. We have a long way to go.

No pics yet, but we did get a new mattress, sleeping on broken down 5″ of foam was hurting both of us. We got a Spring Air with a tempur-pedic pillow top.

But the biggest step ahead has been… A NEW PROPANE REFRIGERATOR …!!!! A Servel, and now we are out of the 5 coolers we had going and the constant upkeep and runs for ice, pics next time maybe. The kitchen area is really not ‘too pretty’ right now.

That’s about it from the ‘living in the hills’ files. We are working on the water system, our pressure pump keeps dying and even the replacement pump does too, so we need to rethink how that is set up. And I am researching the whole home generator we will need for the battery array and inverter for the power system. I bet we end up with the generator first, which isn’t the way I wanted to go, but … time will tell.

And, Russel enlarged our fenced garden area in front of the house. He has wanted to do that for a long time. Raised beds I had planted years ago, had gone fallow due to either summers blast furnace heat and the deer. Now that we have all that enclosed, I may just get a bit of the gardening energy back that I used to have.

As for deer, we have a small herd of about 5 bucks who visit us almost daily. If my windows were clean enough to shoot through, I would have gotten some great shots. We have a couple ravens who we feed as well as juncos. The prettiest bird we’ve id’d though has been the Varied Thrush, which is much more striking than the common thrush that looks a lot like a robin.

Happy New Year to You!

Haven’t been in town much, hence no updates to this blog. Until the power system at the land house…now my home .. happens, I won’t be here very much. And we hope for that in this coming year, sooner I hope.

We had lots of hail and weather this week and more coming, snow at our house that’s only at 1320 feet! We also had a small roof leak due to sloppy work by our builder, good thing I haven’t seen him today or I would really get on his case. We were out in that said weather wind storm hail rain, Russel on a 16′ ladder, un-damming a valley that filled with debris due to a flange for a vent cutting into the valley..it backed up and leaked.

Funny thing too, I was putting away towels in bathroom and looked up at the bare light bulb and it was dripping with water! Not good.
But it is fixed. And we couldn’t of done it without the mighty ‘Tim Allen of HomeImprovement’ flashlight…10 million candle power…me holding the light on the roof valley so Russel could see to work…quite the sight really.

Any way.. just a hit and run here at the little town house rental that was home to us for 14 years …it is fading into a place only to come to when we have too. Although all of our stuff is still here, nothing really got moved to the land yet. But it is no longer filled with the cozy life force we had. Time will tell if we will be able to afford to keep it for an office after we do move out of it .. and that won’t be at least until spring or summer.

To any one who comes here, wishing you peace, health, and prosperity in the coming year.

The shots that got away

We have a young buck with one antler gone who visits often. I was watching him through the binoculars while he was munching on madrone berries on the ground. I did this for quite awhile, then noticed to his left and behind the madrone tree…a trunk…not of a tree but a beast… big old granddaddy with antlers as long as my arms came slowing out of the wood onto the driveway.

He was HUGE.

And he looked at me looking at him and I would of gotten the best shots … but wouldn’t ya know it, the camera was in town as I left it there just the day before to charge and pull images off. Damn. Really, this was a rare photo opportunity that i missed.

The same day just after my deer friends continued on over the divide, our resident grey squirrel with the biggest fluffiest tail I have ever seen, was posing for me as well. AND i saw a bright PINK mushroom… all this in one day and the one day the camera wasn’t with me.

Flame On!

We are having a beautiful fall, for the north coast. We don’t get the great color changes that many areas of the world get, so we have to make do with the bit that comes our way.

A ‘fancy’ type of maple I think. I really like the shape, unfortunately a branch is missing from this tree, I drive by it on the way into town hope to buy one for our place soon.

Here’s some Orange sherbert clouds and sunset. I have a very narrow window through the trees to take sunset pictures.

I also uploaded a couple more Agave pics over at the gallery, EyeSee.

These will be the last in the series, as the owner is going to cut the stalks down before they come down and do damage to someone or something. They will be missed. Even before the flowering started, the rosettes always caught my eye. He did tell me that I can dig as many baby plants up as I want, I just haven’t done that yet.

Kaya is finally accumulating to the new homestead. She is going out at night a lot, as it is better for her to hunt the little critters. She is still a bit timid about the space as it is far larger and wild than town life was. She did grow up as a baby in the hills for four years, so I hope some of the savvy comes back to her.

Sunsets and Katydid

Life in the hills is great…wish I had this computer and the power to run it safely there, and I would very rarely come into town.

We are finally into our rainy season, although we have been blessed with sunny days in between the storms for now, I believe an El Nino is forming and may account for a very wet winter yet.

It is Fall

Well, I am spending more and more time at my house in the hills. This little town house has has just become a stop over place, with the exception of my computer and refrigerator and maybe more than one tv station, I don’t miss it.

We brought, Kaya, our cat who we love, out last week. I feel she feels a captive as we won’t let her out of the house until we know she won’t run off and try to come back to town. She is handling it all very well, I could do with out the litterbox. Although I found a recyled newspaper litter that works great.

I have some ‘buggy’ pictures, but no time to work them up to post here or at my gallery, maybe next time in town.

Getting a good solar/battery power system together for the computer and lights and all is a high priority, I hope we can swing that this year. I really want to take my new computer out there with me, I may never come to town again!

I am turning off ‘comments’ on this blog for now 🙁
Spammers!! I am not here (in town) enough (like every day) to update MTBlacklist, and keep the spammers away. Last weekend I had 50 or so to deal with. (I know that isn’t much compared to many bloggers, but it took computer time that I would of rather used in other ways.) Any way if any one wants to ‘talk to me’ feel free to email me, I am sure you can figure that out!

That’s it for now, gotta go pack up all the laundry and food and ice and stuff and head out. Out to the sunny high top of the ridge wind blowing through the trees silence except for the birds and ravens ..we have a flock of wild pigeons!

On My Beat

Living in the hills of southern Humboldt