If not now, then when?

When people tell me that they admire what we’re doing, or that they wish they could do something similar, I wonder why. Why aren’t you? What’s keeping you from doing whatever it is that you want to do?

Is it the fear of the unknown, or maybe just anxiety of the uncertain?  Some of the most stressful times in our lives are about change.  Change in relationship status, change of job, and change of home, are the worst.  We are genetically programmed to avoid things that generate great deals of stress as a survival mechanism right?  If that’s the case, maybe some people are more inclined to do and others are happy to live their lives and wish they could.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not putting down anyone who wishes they could do something and thinks they will “some day”. I just want to know WHEN? There is no perfect timing for anything really. There is a quote I think of whenever people say they have a plan for such-and-such and they’ll do it when the time is right. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

More often than not, the biggest and best things that happen to us do so without our planning for them to happen. Children for instance…  In most cases, they are a happy surprise, and we make room for them in our lives and do our best to raise them into human beings that we respect.

I remember when I was a kid I would see the neighborhood kids playing double dutch jump rope.  There’s a certain poetry to it, a rhythm and timing required in order to jump in and out without getting caught in the ropes.  I would sit and observe the kids lean back and forth in rhythm waiting for their moment, maybe a false start now and then, but eventually they would jump in.

There is definitely a time for planning and a time for executing your plan.  If you spend your whole life planning and waiting for your perfect time to jump in, you’re most likely going to miss your chance.   Set a date, do everything within your power to meet your deadline and if that day comes…. JUMP

Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to fall down.  Being risk averse is what keeps us stuck in our inertia. We need to take risks once in a while in order to gain momentum and have the opportunity to enjoy hard-fought success, or even well earned lessons in what not to do next time.

 

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Sharing The Harvest

One of our core values is sharing our harvest with those in need.  I take a philosophical view rather than literal on this one.  Sometimes our harvest isn’t tangible.  Sometimes it’s wisdom, or experience, or know-how.

Since we haven’t been able to do much yet to rebuild our soil structure, we haven’t had much reaping from our sowing into the land yet.  What we have harvested is a bit more valuable in my opinion. We have taken a difficult path, and have learned a great deal about what would have made it easier.  I would like to share some of that with people who may be in need of guidance.  If you want to get started down the road to self-sufficiency, or are just starting out in life, my number one piece of advice would be….

Avoid debt!

Our culture has gotten into the mindset of monthly payments instead of thinking about true costs. That has created a scenario where a vast majority of people are simply wage slaves and work in order to service debt.  Building true wealth is difficult to nearly impossible and at the same time our Social Security net has never been in more jeopardy.

The number one cause of most of the stress in my life has been financial in nature.  It has been a long road, and we have still got a long way to go, but eliminating debt has reduced that stress immensely.  I recommend listening to Dave Ramsey and reading his book “Total Money Makeover”.  Years ago he inspired me to change my way of thinking and I became very debt averse.  We have taken on debt here and there due to lack of discipline in following his plan, but we’ve managed to not take on very much and eliminated most of what we added.

Think about how much lower your stress levels would be if you weren’t required to hand over all of your money to someone else every time you get paid. Would you let your job stress you out as much if you knew you didn’t really need it?  Studying homesteading and permaculture principles has given me hope that some day we will be our own masters without needing to earn high salaries.  We’re not at that point yet, but we’re close.

Think of yourself as a business, and your budget as a P&L report.  If you can’t increase your income, you must decrease your expenditures.  Every dollar you don’t spend goes straight to the bottom line.  A vast majority of our expenses are groceries and we will be taking care of more and more of those needs ourself over time. That will take money from the debit column of our P&L statement straight to the credit side which can be used to increase our wealth by eliminating liabilities i.e. debt.  Coming from families of limited resources and lacking education in financial principles means that we had to start from a tough position. But after years of struggle, I can finally allow myself to think about a future of financial freedom.

What would life be like for you if you could work a job because you liked it? One of the common questions self-help gurus ask people is “If happiness were currency, what career would make you rich?” and I think we all should ask ourselves this question.  For me I think it would be teaching.  Not kids (I don’t have the patience for that) but people who want to learn what I know.  I get genuine enjoyment out of seeing someone understand something that I’m explaining to them.  I’m a learner first and foremost, and one of the best ways to truly understand something is to explain it to someone else.

Education is another one of our core values, but I’ll leave that for another post.

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How We Found Our Land

Read our previous biography post if you want to see what brought us to this point.

I had been regularly checking listings on-line for properties that could possibly help us get out of our current situation when I found “the one”.  The listing said “Junky Property With Trailer” and it was listed at $16,500 for 6.7 acres.  The land was described as gently rolling with a pond.  This sounded great! So we called and set up an appointment to meet at the property.  This was around mid February of 2015 and we had just gotten our tax return back.

We were early to the meeting so we took the opportunity to look over the property a bit.  The “trailer” was more of a skeleton of a trailer than anything and would cost way too much to make inhabitable again.

The land was also recently timbered and they left behind a mess. We saw potential in the land though, and there were lots of possibilities.

Plus there’s a pond!

As you can see from the pictures, there is a great deal of work to be done so we used that as a negotiating point along with the fact that the trailer was uninhabitable. We successfully negotiated a fair price and closed on the property.  We signed a land contract with terms of 20% down amortized over a ten year term. Also we made sure there would be no penalty for paying it off early.

On our next biography post, we’ll discuss what we had to do to move onto our property.  Thanks for spending some time with us! Join us on Facebook for more details about our day-to-day life.

Free Food! Harvesting Black Walnuts

There aren’t many things better than free food! We were lucky enough to inherit a couple of black walnut trees with our property which produced an abundance of nuts this year. So I decided to try and harvest some.

Being new to this, I had to research what was needed in order to harvest the meat from them.  After reading a couple of blogs and watching a few YouTube videos I figured out a plan.

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Required supplies:

• 2 containers to hold the nuts
• Disposable gloves
• Knife
• A supply of water
• Something to dry the nuts on/in with plenty of air circulation
• A sturdy device to crack the shell (these guys are tough!)
• Something to assist in Picking the meat out
• Patience and perseverance

After collecting what you think you’ll want to process, It’s time to get your hands dirty. (hopefully just your gloves though.)

Step one: Remove the hull from the nut.

There are many methods that people use the hull walnuts including running them over with a vehicle, specialized machines, or pushing them through a hole in a board. The simplest way for me was to use a knife. After putting on my nitrile gloves to ensure I wouldn’t have brown hands for the next two weeks, I started cutting open the hulls. I cut them the same way you would cut an avocado.  Make a slice around the circumference and pull the halves apart.

After removing the hull, you’ll want to be careful how you dispose of them. They can be toxic and have natural herbicidal characteristics so you don’t want to put them in your compost bin or feed them to any animals.

Step two: clean off the shells

Once you get the nut free from the outer hull, there will be some material left on them that you need to remove for them to dry properly.  The easiest method I saw was to use a pressure washer int a 5 gallon bucket of nuts. but since we don’t have access to a garden hose right now I had to go manual.

Using a container of water I soaked them for 20 minutes,agitated them by rubbing them against each other, put them into another container of fresh water and agitated them again.  After a few cycles of this I thought “There has to be something else I can do”. So I dug through what I call my redneck scrap pile and made a processing station.  It comprised of an old baby activity center, the front cage from a broken oscillating fan, and a bucket that I bought from the Dollar Tree.

Using the old fan grille, I just rubbed the excess material off of the shells and let it fall down into the bucket that held the nuts waiting to be processed. This was a great deal more effective then just agitating them in the bucket of water.

Step three: Dry them out

All my research told me that drying them in open air is the most effective. So I found an old cabbage bag, put all the walnuts in it, and hung it from a tree branch for a couple of weeks.

Step four: Coerce the shells to give up their meat

These shells are really tough to crack.  I tried some channel lock type pliers and vice grips, neither of which were up to the task. The item I had that was the most effective was a c-clamp.  It was still kind of tricky to keep the shells from shooting across the room though. (squeezing round things with two flat plates….) My son helped with this part as much as he could, but like I said, these things are pretty tough.

Once you convince the shells to open up you still have to do some work.  Black walnuts are different from regular walnuts owing the fact that there are four chambers inside instead of two.  You’re not going to be able to get all the nut meat out very easily.  I found a small flat head screwdriver in my tool cart (that mess you see behind my son) to help with this task.

My eldest daughter wanted to help with this part..

We kept going at this for about 40 minutes while the toddler napped and ended up with about a cup of walnut meat. Half of which was immediately eaten, the rest we froze for future use.

Since we didn’t know if we would like these, I didn’t want to spend money on specialized equipment.  After trying them and finding out that we do like them, I will most likely invest in at least a proper heavy duty nut cracker and meat pick to use next time.

Overall, we had fun and made a memory doing this.

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Thanks for visiting!

Why We Chose This Life

Admittedly, this lifestyle isn’t for everyone. It’s a rather stark contrast to the life most people are accustomed. Natalie and I (Rob) wanted to help provide a more stable life for our children than the life we had growing up.

We grew up in different, but similar situations in Columbus Ohio.  Both of our families were financially challenged and could offer little in terms of helping us get started in life. I have an associate degree from a national technical university and Natalie has experience as a General Manager of fast food restaurants.  After having our first child along with my son from a previous relationship, it became apparent that we were stuck in the same cycle as most people.

The routine of getting a paycheck, paying bills/buying groceries and barely making it to the next paycheck is all too familiar to many families.  We didn’t want to be stuck in that cycle forever but didn’t immediately know what to do about it.

Our first idea was to buy a run down mobile home in a trailer park right next to Port Columbus International airport.  The idea was to reduce our monthly housing costs.  It would have cost us only $250 per month in lot rent plus electric and natural gas bills (trash was included). So we moved in with my mother for a few months in order to use the money we would normally use for bills to fix up the trailer.

To make a long story short, we couldn’t get along well with my mother and had to move out.  We located a house about a mile and a half from downtown Columbus that rented for $495 per month.  As you can guess, with rent that cheap the neighborhood wasn’t good.  Our neighbor across the street had frequent visitors that only stayed for 10-20 minutes. (I’m sure we can all piece together what they were there for) That same neighbor had shootouts on at least 3 occasions in the 2+ years that we lived in that house.  We had other “interesting” neighbors with similar stories as well.

While we lived there, we hadn’t given up on changing our story.  We planted a garden with corn, cucumbers, oregano, tomatoes, and a little watermelon plant that my son wanted. I build a planter box out of reclaimed pallets that we used to grow the tomatoes, and we kept studying the skills we wanted to hone. (ex. bushcraft, gardening, foraging, herbal medicine, self-reliance in general.)

These are the skills that we want to share with everyone as we continue to learn and grow.  In a later post we will discuss how we made our move to leave the city and start living the dream that we imagined for years.

If you’re enjoying our story, check back for more about us, the projects we do, and tips on how you can become more self-sufficient.  Even if you don’t want to move out to the middle of nowhere like we did.  We had great success in our little urban garden in the middle of the city and will be sharing tips on how you can do it too.

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Up-cycling A Juice Container

One thing that we can all do to save money is re-purposing things that we would otherwise throw away. I had an empty gallon juice container ready to go out in the trash and saw something more useful.

Since we are trying to create a sustainable homestead, one of the things we are doing is growing some of our own food. We don’t have a garden hose output on our trailer right now, so we use a watering can when needed. The inexpensive watering cans usually end up getting broken with young kids and dogs running around, so we end up buying one every year.

So I decided to try and turn this trash into cash by reusing it as something we would otherwise buy.

This project was so easy, I’m certain my 8 year old could have done it. All that needs done is to drill some holes in the lid. So I dug out my drill bit assortment, chose something I thought appropriately sized, and made a ring of holes.

        

All that’s left to do now is fill it up and test it out….

It works pretty well for something I did in about 45 seconds.

Thanks for joining us! Feel free to visit us on Facebook or leave us a message on our contact page if you have any questions or comments.

– R

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome

We’ve set up this site in order to share our adventures in creating a sustainable life.  We’ve moved away from the big city and made our way to a rural setting, now the hard part begins…. Learning to live the way our grandparents did.

There will be a new blog post at least once a week, so check back regularly to see our progress.

Thanks for joining us! Feel free to visit us on Facebook or leave us a message on our contact page if you have any questions or comments.

-R