Ours must be more vicious they eat it all pretty much except railroad ties and telephone poles.
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The first morning with frost here and the grouse have started to play on the bog, apparently autumn is here.
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Here too. From above 30 C to under 20 C in one week. I have to hurry up with that heat exchanger. Heating season is coming again.
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Telephone poles are all pressure treated now but old railroad ties were just soaked in vats of creosote. I have an old railroad bed running through the back of my property that was put in in the 1890ās The ties are still in the ground and you still have a hard time pulling the spikes out of them that were left when they pulled out the rails. I would at least brush on a few coats of creosote or asphalt sealer diluted with a little kerosene on Toneās rafters. We donāt have termites in Northern Michigan either but we do have carpenter ants. They are not as bad as termites.
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While Iām thinking about it. There may be other people here as obsessed with self-sufficiency as I am. Here is a web site that has thousands of threads about just about anything you ever wanted to know
Another site some of you may not be aware of.
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Most of the old railroad ties are oak. I donāt think I have seen any that where not. We bought them back in the 80s to use as curbing and posts in the stall barn. Definitely not fun to drive spikes into to join them. But they did last as long as we needed them. It did get to the point where it was hard to find good used ones though.
Telephone poles are pine or spruce for the most part some soft wood that will bend in the wind and not snap as they have no load to speak of that requires supporting. Those freight trains needed a good strong bed.
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Wow, that is a really fascinating collection of articles. Clearly the main premise of the authors that there is an impending āpole shiftā to be caused by a celestial body passing close to the earth seems to have been written by somebody who should not have stopped taking their medication. I tried to read some of it, butā¦ yeahā¦ Sort of fascinating in and of itself.
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Tom, that is a fantastic collection of articles. Thank you for sharing.
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Ha! No comment on the above.
With two sequential hurricanes slamming the U.S. Gulf coast. And just that seasons beginning. Tornadoes season 'acoming again for many. Cities cores now into killing rioting. California and Oregon wildfire season into full swing.
I/we lost grid power for a few hours yesterday from a tree drought limb dropping across the local grid power lines. By dark if persisted I would have been into electrical generator running.
And of course CarlOR, you and I and other FireRingers just waiting for the next local disturbing ground shaker or our 600 years due 9.0 . . . .
Plenty enough reasons to work on home self sufficiency, redundancy, to cover at least 90 days. Much better to go for 1 year/annual basics self-sufficiency.
Years working on this and still I cannot claim a true Biblical wisdom 7 years self-sufficiency.
Donāt need no PlanetXās, Tribulations. Alien Arrivals urgings to do this.
Apologize for using a COVID-19 reference here: but, without all of the rush, rush you-just-must social distractions on lock-down holds; NOW is the time to home inward focus on the here&nows.
Meaningfully.
Effectively.
And that is home woodgasing for needed powers.
Do Now. Learn NOW. While it is easy versus hard-do wanting after all of the proven repetitive, will happen, occurrences have beat you down; powerless.
Oh. Been trending 36-42F at nights here. 2-5C. Sensitives growth stopping frosts will be anytime now.
Need another week or so for the vegetable garden corn ears to finish out. Tomatoes hopeless for us this year. Frost though does sweeten set up the Candice grapes. The fall pears and others.
Change is good. (Wifies Amazon Prime account just got overlayed shadowed attempting to access her bank accounts to drain them. So she has had to now go Amazon-free; the sourceā¦ Facebook-free now, too. A common device linked results. Goody. Good. Good. Good.)
Regards
Steve unruh
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You and I and in the same ball park Steve. Iām enjoying my time here just talking about gasifiers and ignoring survival for a change. Everyone should be aware though that nearly all the canned goods and packaged foods that are on your supermarket shelves right now were processed last year. Because labor was not available this spring during the lock downs not much was harvested or sent to the processing plants. I communicate with people all over the country and in Germany and they are all reporting dwindling supplyās on shelves. Believe what you want about planet X , geological disasters, plagues or other biblical prophesies going hungry is a bad plan. Buy everything you can right now and store it so that no one can just come and take it from you. That may have seemed a little paranoid six months ago, but there are a lot of people out there right now that are telling you that they are coming to make your stuff, their stuff. When food get scarce even the solid citizen will rob you if he can. Hunger justifies everything. I posted about how the state of Washington is filling warehouses with stored food and the guy in charge claiming that the same is going on in states all over the country. They will strip the supplies before you ever get a chance at them. If may seem they are being altruistic and working in the interests of the people but if you look at the Rockefeller Foundation report I posted in the Covid thread you will see that part of the plan besides lock downs is population control by food supply. Screw the toilet paper. Get some rice, beans and whatever cheap staple you can find.
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This is not what I remember. I recall reading articles about millions of pounds of fresh vegetables being tilled under this spring. They were also dumping out milk, and a farmer in Idaho made a 2 story pile pile of potatoes and told people to come take whatever they wanted. The problem was just that restaurants and big institutions stopped buying 50lb bags of potatoes, or 20lb boxes of green beans. The food system has gotten so streamlined that it made more sense financially to till under all that food than to figure out how to put it in smaller bags. There were labor problems at slaughterhouses, but farmers by and large managed to prevent the giant meat shortage everyone was talking about.
I dont know the statistics, but I suspect the vast majority of the calories harvested in the US will be brought in this fall when the midwest corn and soy is ready. Having a bit of food put by is a fine plan, but panic buying doesnt really do anybody any good. The US food supply is pretty robust, so I am not worrying.
The big problem with conspiracy theories is that the good ones can not be easily disproven. The big crisis is always just over the horizon, and when it doesnt come, an overlooked fact is brought out to explain why the prediction was just a little premature. If you think you have better information than me, I would be happy to place a friendly wager. Tell me the day you think I will no longer be able to stroll into a grocery store and fill my cart with whatever I want. The day after, we will settle up.
It does make me wonder if maybe these conspiracy theories are just a sort of game? Do you remember the imaginative play that was so fun as children, where you would imagine yourself in some other reality? Common household items would take on new life as the props - the broom handle that becomes your lightsaber or whatever? Its really not so different from LARPers, or people who dress up and reenact the civil war, or renaissances fairs, or whatever. But those people presumably go back to real life when they take off the costume. As much as I enjoy teasing civil war reenactors, in way, I think we could all benefit from taking life a little less seriously. What all this makes me wonder is; why choose such a gloomy fantasy? Is it not satisfying enough to set out to be self-sufficient just because it is fun? Does there have to be a threat of annihilation hanging over your head to make you go out and hoe the beans? 
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Easy for you to say Carl. You have a large garden full of food and Iām sure you sock it away every year. Same with me. The whole point of my original thread was that I need to find a way to become food self sufficient and that means being able to grow year round. Not possible without power and probably not possible with it. Food supply in great shape. Food supply on life support. Iām not going to spin that bottle. The Sh never hits the fan. Thatās great. Iām still always going to be prepared to supply my own needs for an extended period of time because Iām old enough to come from people that lived through the thirties and my Grandma made me āwokeā
Here and all over the country it took about a week after people were locked out of their jobs for the food banks to get lines all the way to tomorrow. Iāll never be in one of those lines.
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Haha, despite my best efforts, I think I would starve in a couple weeks if I had to feed myself and my family out of our garden. A few months, maybe, if the timing was just right. Self sufficiency is a fun thing to strive for, and I get satisfaction out of the challenge; but for me its just a pastime.
And in the not too distant past, people did manage to feed themselves just fine without gardening year round. They didnt even have canned goods or freezers. Just lots and lots of work. Drudgery; a word that we hardly use anymore because we have built so many machines to distance ourselves from it. It doesnt really sound like all that much fun, so I understand that having a looming crisis might help make it all seem worth it.
Anyway, I feel like I have taken up enough of this thread, so if anyone wants to keep kicking around these ideas, we could maybe move it somewhere elseā¦ As an apt segue, does anyone have any recent garden pictures to share?
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Best corn crop ever!
Zucchiniās, acorn squash, tomatoes, raspberries, beans, sugar peas, rhubarb are still booming.
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Ha ha. You donāt want to see ours. Every year we start very enthousiastic. This year our our middle one said, why all the effort? In a few month it is a big mess and you canā t find anything. No no, we said. Not this year! Hate to admit, but he is right. Canāt find the asperagus and new cherries. Apple and pear are ok. Prumes were very good. And wallnuts are coming a lot.
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āYou dont need to be self sufficiant at everything. Just be self sufficiant at something.ā is a good quote to live by.
Joep, it was same here. Overgrown garden took so much time it was not feasable to keep. But dont blame the nature, blame your self for lack of knolidge is what l always say.
Research payed off. I found out about the deep mulch system and tryed it out. Gardening now takes less effort thain going to the supermarket. I can not stress enaugh how much l recomend this sistem.
We are currently self sufficiant on meat, eggs and milk for protein, potatoes for carbs and on most vegetables and herbs. But we are not self sufficiant in animal feed and that we need to work on.
For us its allso the financial part involved. If l wuld need to buy all the food of same quality as home grown that wuld take about half of our income. This money now stays for other things.
In my thinking, its not realy nessesery to be 100% self sufficiant, its important to know how to be in case hell breaks loose.
Growing year round. I cant see why thats a problem? There are loads of plants that thrive in cold weather and survive frost. Its true, you cant grow tomatoes and peppers but there is plenty of time for that in the summer. When all the summer crops are gone, we plant turnips, rutabaga, and black radish. Those can stay under the snow and be picked on demand for animal feed and the table. Most brassacas allso. Bouching onions and leaks thrive in coldness.
Allso, there are crops with wery long shelf life. Potato, pumpkins, turnips, apples, carotsā¦ will last a whole year if correctly stored. Eggs can be limed and will last at least 6 months unrefrigerated. I am slowly learning tricks to the trade but its such a shame so much knolidge was lostā¦
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Kristijan, I donāt remember if I mentioned, but Iām self sufficient on fuel for the truck 
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Hard to out-grow weeds. My biggest problem this year was cucumber beetles and squash bugs. Planted fifty pumpkin and fifty assorted winter squash and will probably end up with produce from twenty of each. I gave up on the Japanese beetles in the grapes. I just hope they have left enough leaves for the grapes to survive. Over the last ten years I have converted most of the garden to raised beds. Way more yield per square foot because the soil can be easily amended. The last few years Iāve been doing more and more in Dutch Buckets and experimenting with Kratky hydroponics. Iād like to move more and more in that direction. I have all the infra-structure set up for an aquaponic system but wonāt be pulling the pin on that until I can assure myself that I have power 24/7
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Tom, nothing wrong with being somewhat prepared! I volunteer at a food bank. If we were that busy, we would be totally out of food in about an hour. Thankfully, our small town keeps calm and carries on. I notice a lot of cars in that line much newer and nicer than mine. Just sayāin. 
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I posted before on my wifeās garden, mulched raised beds are so easy. As far as insects, grow some tobacco around the garden, then if that not enough make tobacco tea and spray.
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